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Jia Zhang-ke & Zhao Tao

A TOUCH OF SIN written and directed by Jia Zhang-ke, with Jiang Wu, Wang Baoqiang, Zhao Tao and Luo Lanshan. A filmswelike release. 133 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (October 18). For venues and times, see Movies, page 80.


Jia Zhang-ke makes movies about China in transition, as his country moves from decades of hardline Communism to a more capitalist mentality.

But things are changing once again in China in Platform, The World and Still Life, his characters reacted to that transition with bemusement or confusion. In his new feature, A Touch Of Sin, ordinary people respond to new pressures – social, political, familial – with explosive violence.

“A lot of people are asking me, ‘So what do you think of the future?'” Jia says through an interpreter, doing a day of press at the Toronto Film Festival with his wife and frequent star, Zhao Tao.

“I believe that in order to understand where we’re going, we have to understand what we’re going through now. We have to observe it, and this is what this film is about.”

A Touch Of Sin is a multi-character drama about people struggling with day-to-day life in modern-day China, where the working poor are constantly abused by those in authority. This meant taking the film in a markedly different direction than his other work fortunately, Jia had also been developing a project in the martial arts genre known as wuxia, so he simply borrowed its sensibility.

“I applied the rubric and aesthetics of wuxia cinema to a contemporary Chinese milieu,” he says. “The four segments are filled with despair and darkness and violence, and there’s a certain sense of helplessness to the characters.”

Jia says it was important that the conflicts in A Touch Of Sin have an archetypal feel despite the modern setting.

“It speaks to my idea that human destiny has perhaps not changed very fundamentally over the course of history,” he says. “The [heightened] tragedy of these characters and these stories can resonate with personal stories now, and that’s my primary reason for using the language of wuxia. Previous wuxia films all told stories about feudal or ancient China, whereas my wuxia film tells a story of contemporary China.”

Certainly, the storyline for Zhao’s character wouldn’t be out of place in a feudal setting: she plays a young woman struggling with her job as a receptionist in a brothel. When a pushy customer demands that she give him a massage and won’t take no for an answer, Zhao’s character becomes a knife-wielding avenger.

“The way she answers violence with violence is a way for her to reclaim her self-respect,” Zhao says. “Some women, when they encounter this violence, their reaction is just to take it. In the case of my character, she decides to be violent back.”

“The violence in the four sequences begins at an ethical level,” Jia says. “And then I thought that these momentary acts of violence are sort of a language unto themselves – a way to express that which cannot be expressed in words.”

That’s where the wuxia came in – and capturing the eerie beauty of a brutal martial arts sequence presented new challenges for both director and star.

“On the level of performance, it was incredibly difficult to capture this sense of elegance and beauty,” Zhao says. “I believe this beauty that you’re describing is also the beauty of one’s self-respect, because it’s about the moment in which you’re taking back your self-respect. With violence.”

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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