(This review has been kicking around on my hard drive for a while. Check out the film on Fandor.)
When a church bell rings, China’s extreme northeast is
probably the last thing on your mind. This is the image, however, that director
Zhao Liang leaves us with at the end of
Crime
and Punishment, an oblique yet searing portrayal of power and oppression in
a sleepy, ordinary town. Hymns are heard coming from the quaint church, nestled
among the snow-covered hills, as a line of unconcerned people carrying a couch,
a dresser and a bed make their way across the frame in the foreground. The shot
not only sparks an association with the moral deliberations of the film’s
literary namesake, but also adds a sharp contrast to the seemingly unprincipled
malaise we just watched.
China is a bundle of contradictions and opposing forces, and,
in this respect, it is no different than any other country. But as it gains
international prowess, both economically and politically, and it sheds its
xenophobic skin, Western perception runs rampant with grand proclamations,
broad assumptions and demonizing stereotypes—none of them necessarily true and
none of them necessarily false. The burgeoning new documentary movement in
China takes very bold vérité stabs at humanizing, if not allegorizing, the
social paradoxes, one film, one person, and one shot at a time.
Crime and Punishment,
Zhao Liang first feature length documentary, is an observational powerhouse.
Bringing direct cinema back from the ashes, Zhao adds another dimension to China’s
dichotomies by focusing on a small forgotten corner of this rising superpower. Situated
on his home turf, Zhao is given unprecedented access to a local police station
along the North Korean border. Mean streets these are not. Instead we have life
on the margins where ambitions of any kind have left this town behind. The
police are candid, the situations are often defy logic, and the arrests add up
to little more than harassment masquerading as control. Even moments of
idleness seem to be cloaked in an aura of base tedium: cleaning a gun, fiddling
with a pair of handcuffs or a bout of wrestling in the snow.
The people detained are less hardened criminals than they
are the pettiest of thieves push by dire financial circumstances. A deaf man
suspected of stealing a cell phone is drubbed for a confession that he verbally
can’t give. A mother is berated for her mentally handicap son who called the
police with a false report of a dead body. A gambling room is busted and their Mahjong pieces
confiscated. An elderly scrap collector is nicked for not having a permit to do
so. And at a routine checkpoint, four men are caught with illegally harvested
timber. That the men were probably going to use the wood to either heat their
homes or earn a little money makes little difference to the police officers. Although
forced into a plea of guilt, it is subsequently overturned by a complaint of
police brutality from a savvy wife who nearly chases the officers away from her
house. Many of the verbal maneuverings here would fit well in an absurdist
play.
With a hands-off approach, Zhao draws a very fine line
between the oppressed and the oppressors and quickly reveals a somewhat
desperate attempt to maintain a certain amount of authority and self-respect within
a low-lying hierarchy. Crime and
Punishment opens quietly with a ritual where the policemen fold their
bedding into an impossible cube. If you detach yourself, this formality strikes
very close to pure performance art, but as a prescribed duty this meticulous
detail is indicative of the systematic subservience expected from the officers.
You don’t see it when they are nonchalantly castigating their fellow comrades,
but the veiled pressures lie just bellow the surface, causing these men to kick
a dog when it’s down, figuratively and quite literally. Just another cog in a
repressive regime, these latent bullies hide their vulnerability behind their
uniform. When some are dismissed in a callous bureaucratic downsizing, the rug that
is pulled out from beneath these young men is written all over their faces. One
officer’s depressed drunken diatribe, perhaps realizing that he will soon be no
different than his former detainees, lays bare an unexpected fragility and
tenderness.
Which almost brings us back to the church, but not before a figurative
act of violence is enacted on a powerless, abused creature. Jokingly referred
to as a sacrificial killing, a cursory slaughter is underscored with a
disturbing edge of pitilessness. Although shocking—especially to Western eyes
where animals are killed by someone else’s hand behind closed doors—the scene
is used to connect the dots that add up to larger implications. Much like
Dostoyevsky’s novel, Zhao’s documentary is less about specific crimes and
punishments (or lack thereof) than it is about internal transgression and the
hypothetical collective question of, where do we go from here? Zhao’s answer is
open-ended, with the Currier and Ives portrait of the church humorously
disrupted by a transient reality.
