Chinese director Wang Chou's Luxury Car, (Voiture de luxe), is a deeply moving and a shocking film, deeply moving for the craft with which Chou tells his story, shocking because the film ends up not merely being an allegory of a failed revolution, (which really wouldn't be much of a surprise), but because it is so deeply critical of what China has become that it strongly suggests that China's failure to hold onto its communist ideology represents a profound loss for its people. Viewers of Eastern European cinema have become accustomed to what has been labelled "soviet nostalgia." Chou's indictment goes further than most of the work in that genre. This is a film noir whose darkness grows out of the garish, almost obscent neon glitter that Chou allows to stand for the new China.The shock a Western viewer experiences after viewing such a work seems, on reflection, somewhat ingenuous. Among China's enormous population, it should probably come as no surprise that there are more than a few citizens who would agree with Chou's vision. One can only speculate on how many Chinese are sympathetic to Chou's point of view. Nevertheless, we here in the West do not often gain exposure to such work and it does make one wonder about the present Chinese government's letting this film be shown at all, either domestically or abroad. (The film was given a Prix un certain regard at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.) The admittedly small American audience who might wish to see this film have CUNY TV's City Cinematheque to thank for the opportunity.
City Cinematheque, presided over by City College Professor Jerry Carlson, is a jewel in the programming crown of the City University of New York's public television outlet, known here in New York as CUNY TV 75. The show and its host deserve enormous praise for delivering to its following (which one can only hope is growing) films that are outstanding either because they are of great importance in the history of film, or because they give us rare insight into the cinemas of other nations. As Professor Carlson would no doubt himself admit, the show serves the valuable function the many art theaters that once graced the city used to fulfill. Most of those little art theaters, along with their free espresso and cookies, are long gone and with them the opportunity for both young and old, but particularly the young to catch up on the great works of the past and to see what is considered cutting edge here in the U.S. and around the world.
Since CUNY TV's focus is understandably on education, an additional feature of City Cinematheque is a thirty-minute discussion between Professor Carlson and, usually, some appropriate member of CUNY's staff following each film. Guest discussants are often colleagues in the school's Film Department, but they may be men and women from other disciplines and venues as well, including, on occasion, the film makers themselves. Given the debt we owe Professor Carlson for his efforts, given the obvious scholarship that he possesses, given his equally obvious love of the art form, it seems less than gracious to carp with him over the content of those discussions. Yet, I probably share with at least a few others among his viewers, the occasional experience of listening to what Professor Carlson has chosen to discuss about a particular film and wanting to jump into the television set, grab him by his tweedy lapels and scream. The discussion period following the showing of Wang Chou's Luxury Car was such a time.
Now, before I launch into what I consider to be my justifiable criticisms of the discussion following the film, let me pause a moment to reprise my gratitude to the show's host. Where else on television could one currently get access to some of the great silent classics as well as avant-garde work coming out of South America, Eastern Europe or even North Africa? Where else on television can one gain the invaluable insights into the current state of film-making around the world that are obviously the fruit of Professor Carlson's deep and vast knowledge of film, film makers, film history and breaking news from within the industry? To cite just one small example from the very discussion that caused me so much consternation: not only did we learn that China now has over 100 cities with populations in excess of one million, we also learned that the Chinese are currently building vast film houses with large screens and sterophonic sound in those cities in an effort to satisfy the Chinese appetite for what Americans used to call "going to the movies." A bit of film history and a bit of social history as well. In a sense, Professor Carlson may be seen as having earned immunity from the quibbles of his less than forgiving viewers for his occasional lapses. What compels me to risk being called an ingrate or a crank in the case of Luxury Car is what I see as the film's urgent message, a message that would have profited from the kind of explication that Professors Carlson and his guest responder for the film, Cindy Wong, (also of CUNY), seemed almost studiously to avoid.
Since my discussion of Luxury Car will be political in nature, I feel one other aspect of Professor Carlson's television persona needs to be mentioned, namely his political bent. Actually, here again, I think our host's performance has been laudable. Carlson seems to call them as he sees them: cinematic fascist gangsters, communist apparatchiks, Southern racists all meet with the same opprobrium. He is eminently fair, and thus, appearing to have do ideological axes to grind, he no doubt often makes ideologues both of the left and the right unhappy. There are occasions, perhaps, when our host has determined that it might be best to allow a film to speak for itself. As I suggest above, just making certain films available may be considered service enough. Viewers can draw their own conclusions. Interpretations will inevitably differ. Yet, I will confess, on this night, Professor Carlson had me screaming at my television set, "When are you going to talk about the film? Talk about the film, for crying out loud!"
I would argue that Luxury Car, (the title Voiture de luxe is due to French collaboration in its production), is no less than an allegory for contemporary China, an allegory which has as its narrative the descent from the relative virtue of the communist years into a nightmare of whorehouse capitalism. Little wonder then that the film has been essentially ignored in China as well as abroad. For many years we were accustomed to Chinese films being censored for being anti-communist. Now, in the post-Mao era, for reasons that should be obvious to all, it appears that it is a pro-communist work that can get a Chinese artist in trouble. Some may be tempted to conclude that China surely has its own version of European-style "soviet nostalgia," that this is what is on view in Luxury Car. I would argue, to the contrary, that this is a film that not only presents a view of contemporary, capitalist China in the darkest moral terms, but that boldly asserts that the communist period, including the period of the cultural revolution, (an historical episode inevitably depicted here in the West an intrinsically evil), was morally superior to the horrors that are now unfolding in China.
Mao’s body was still warm when the latent forces of capitalism rather brutally took the helm and started to redirect the course of the Chinese ship of state. The group labeled “the Gang of Four” included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. She was eventually condemned to life imprisonment and committed suicide in 1991. The "Gang," (which also included Lin Biao, erstwhile hero of the revolution), fought a short-lived and vain struggle against the new tide and was brought down in a coup d’etat in 1976, just a month after Mao’s death. The group was unsurprisingly indicted as counter-revolutionary by a regime soon led by the born-again entrepreneur Deng Xiaoping (appropriately, a near homonym for "shopping"). Deng led the transition to capitalism. Now, some thirty-five years later, Mao’s portrait may still hang at the entrance to the Forbidden City, but China is no longer Maoist or even, I would argue, communist in any real sense of the term. That the regime currently in power has Mao spinning in his Tiananmen sepulcher seems little in doubt. On the other hand, few would dispute the extent to which millions of Chinese were champing at the bit, waiting for the demise of the great leader so that they could give expression to their ancient passion for building family treasure. They were always there, biding their time. Although often used to describe the people of Great Britain, the phrase “a nation of shopkeepers” * seems more accurately to describe the Chinese character.
The vaunted economic miracle may have factories turning out enormous quantities of goods--from flimsy cotton t-shirts to high-tech appliances--and exporting their wares all over the world, but every political regime, every political philosophy has its icons, and, in China, whether the government admits to it or not, the icon of its new world order is a young girl from the countryside working in a factory for pennies an hour. In exchange for the opportunity to get rich, the Chinese must now pay for everything. The state factories are mostly all gone and, with them, the guarantee of employment. The Chinese worker must now "jump in the ocean" of private enterprise if she hopes to survive at all. While the factory girl may symbolize the new economic order, for the artist, the perennial and universal view of how such young women are used has her sellling not her manual labor, but her body. Like crocuses erupting out of the ashes of a volcanic eruption, the first flowers of capitalism in failed socialist states are the young prostitutes. In Shanghai, where once the Peace Hotel housed guests of the Communist Party, it now houses young girls whose charms are advertised by their pimps on the hotel's front steps. And so it is with Li Yanhong, the heroine of Luxury Car.
Having now spent too much time providing background, I will invite the reader to look at the follow-up blog to this one in which I will attempt an analysis of the film.
* A phrase ascribed to Napoleon, but, originally found in Adam Smith, appropriately enough: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers." After the 2008 crisis, China is seen as more than ever compelled to raise up “a people of customers” and abandon its large dependence upon exports. Smith’s insight also provides a clue to the present nature of governance in China.
