A New Old Play
World Cinema
•
2h 59m
Directed by QIU Jiongjiong • Drama • With Tao Gu, Yi Sicheng • 2022 • 180 minutes
Jiongjiong Qiu’s visually magnificent new film is a unique hybrid of fiction, historical reminiscence, and experimental theatre. Its overview of China from the 1930s to the 1980s is filtered through Qiu Yu, a Sichuan opera 'clown' based on the director’s own famous grandfather. As Qiu Yu negotiates his entry into Hades with two comic sidekicks, his departing soul reviews his childhood, his performances, family tragedies, and political perils.
This film of unparalleled aesthetic and political courage takes place in modestly spectacular visual settings: Qiu, a famous artist, has handcrafted an exquisite miniature model village, a fantastical river landscape, a golden sun in the shape of a Buddha’s head. These images set the scene for a constantly shifting acting style that embraces absurdism, political melodrama, comic vaudeville, and ritual tableaux. We are offered memory as a re-lived collective experience, insistently comic in its mode, but expansively humane in its vision.
“Daring and imaginative, with affecting intimacy and candid observations.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Critic’s Pick! A magnificently layered historical epic... breathes new life into a story as old as civilization.” —Austin Considine, The New York Times
Up Next in World Cinema
-
4 Days in France
Directed by Jérôme Reybaud • Drama • 2017 • 137 minutes
Jérôme Reybaud’s remarkably accomplished feature debut is a sly and sophisticated take on gay romance in the 21st century. On a seemingly ordinary night in Paris, Pierre takes one last look his lover Paul’s sleeping body, then steals away i...
-
Shall We Kiss?
Directed by Emmanuel Mouret • Drama • With Virginie Ledoyen, Emmanuel Mouret, Julie Gayet • 2009 • 102 minutes
When Gabriel and Emilie meet by chance, he offers her a ride, and they spend the evening talking, laughing and getting along famously. At the end of the night, Emilie declines Gabriel’s...
-
Heat Wave
Directed by Jean-Jacques Jauffret • Drama • With Adèle Haenel • 2011 • 92 minutes
On a sweltering day in the south of France; an alluring girl; her troubled boyfriend; her mysterious mother and a gruff neighbor collide in tragedy as their secrets lead to a series of shocking events. Stars Adèle ...
