BAMBOO SHOOTS (Jian Yi). 105 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (August 26) at the Projection Booth. See Indie & Rep film. Rating: NNN
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Jian Yi transitions into fiction with Bamboo Shoots, a methodical, quiet, episodic study of poverty in contemporary China that has to be described as a comedy for lack of any other option – you know, because that subject matter is so filled with comedic potential.
The film follows Yang (Wang Jianbao), a 50-year-old peasant who’s sent on a quest to the city to retrieve a condom that his family, thinking it was a preservative (they don’t get out much), put into a box of bamboo destined to be donated to township officials. Yang sets off to find the pesky prophylactic and save his family’s face, meeting an eccentric collection of equally disenfranchised locals along the way.
Yi plays out scenes almost exclusively in long takes, finding a leisurely pace dictated by his actors, mostly non-professionals who deliver impressively naturalistic performances. The result is a darkly satirical vision of China in which the lower classes are deeply repressed and lack even a basic understanding of how their country works.
The small observational moments and fleeting characters can be funny in isolation, but taken as a whole the film feels soul-crushingly bleak, the mark of effective satire.
