Oracle Bones (58 page)

“Mostly, though, I remember all the pretty girls from those movies. Often they weren’t wearing many clothes—their shorts would be cut off, and their sleeves ripped off, and they’d have a revolutionary uniform belt tight around their waist, like this, and they’d be standing there with a gun. God, they were beautiful. I remember one particular scene from a movie about the Nazis and the Albanians. An Albanian woman had her shirt unbuttoned partway, and she was playing a guitar—I’d never seen a guitar before. I still remember that song distinctly.”

IN XINJIANG, AFTER
finishing the escape scene, the actors rode a van for an hour across the Gobi, bouncing over rocks and sand. All of us were staying at the PetroChina Tuha Oilfield Company, a massive complex that was doing exploratory work in the region. After dinner, the pain in Harrison Liu’s neck worsened, and he wanted to see a doctor at the hospital in the oil complex. Jiang Wen, whose back and knees hurt, decided to accompany Harrison. Wang Xueqi figured he’d tag along, too; his ribs could use a checkup. Another actor wasn’t feeling so great, either. By the time we got to the hospital, there were six of us. It was after ten o’clock.

Somebody paged the vice-director of the general medicine department, whose name was Cao Jie. The actors apologized for bothering him so late; the doctor said that it wasn’t a problem. He remarked that he had always enjoyed Jiang Wen’s films.

Jiang Wen took off his shirt and Dr. Cao pressed points along his back, asking if they hurt. After the frustration of the day’s filming, Jiang Wen finally seemed relaxed; he cracked jokes with the other actors. His knees were black and blue. He pressed one of the bruises and farted loudly.

“That’s strange, doctor,” Jiang Wen said thoughtfully. “If I push here, I fart.” He pressed again but nothing happened. “Never mind,” he said.

Dr. Cao kept complaining about all the recent injuries. For days, a steady stream of actors and crew members had been making their way to the hospital. That afternoon, a man had appeared with a fractured ankle.

“He aggravated it by not going to the hospital sooner,” Dr. Cao said. “What exactly are you doing out there?”

“It’s an action film,” Jiang Wen said.

Dr. Cao opened a medical book and showed us exactly where the ankle had been broken. “His foot swelled up like a steamed roll,” the doctor said. “I just don’t understand this. Why didn’t he go to the hospital earlier?”

“I’ve been saying that we need a doctor on the set,” Jiang Wen said.

“It’s dangerous with the horses,” Harrison Liu said.

“You know what the main problem is?” Jiang Wen said. “The stuntmen don’t always go through the horse scenes first, and even if they do, they aren’t riding specialists. They’re martial arts specialists.”

An actor pulled out a pack of Zhongnanhai Lights and asked if they could smoke in the examination room. Dr. Cao took a cigarette as well, and all six of them lit up. The tiny room quickly filled with smoke.

“I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Cao said.

“I think it’s a human rights issue,” Jiang Wen said.

Dr. Cao fitted a neck brace for Harrison Liu. Like Jiang Wen, Harrison was a big man, and his girlfriend was also a blonde foreigner—a Belgian. In the Chinese arts community, it was a sign of success to have foreign girlfriends. Often the women were budding academics who had come to China to research a thesis about anthropology or sociology. Harrison Liu wore cowboy boots. After the 1989 crackdown, he had received political asylum in Canada, where he was now a citizen. He had taken his English name from the Beatle. Occasionally, he acted in Canadian or American films; in 1991, he had played a native Huron in
Black Robe
, which tells the story of the first missionary to Quebec. If you watch the movie closely, you might notice that one member of
the Huron tribe looks Chinese. Harrison still remembered a line that he had spoken in the Huron language. He told me that it meant, “We don’t need to go with this white man.”

The doctor finished with the neck brace and announced that Jiang Wen and Harrison needed CT scans. Jiang Wen glanced at his watch.

“Look, it’s November seventh,” he said. “The anniversary of the Russian Revolution.” He hummed the “Internationale” on the way to the X-ray center. He showed me a text message that had just appeared on his cell phone, from a Beijing talk show host: “I’ve just found
Devils on the Doorstep
on bootleg.”

“I get messages like this every day,” Jiang Wen said proudly. His movie had never been shown in Chinese theaters, but two weeks earlier it had suddenly appeared on the streets. The actor smiled. “Look at everything that just happened,” he said. “We got hurt, we went to the hospital, we’re getting X-rays, it’s the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and now there’s a message about
Devils on the Doorstep
. We could make a movie out of this.”

A technician scanned Harrison’s neck and said it looked like a sprain. Dr. Cao examined the pictures of Jiang Wen’s knees and back. He thought there might be a problem with the fifth and sixth vertebrae; tomorrow a specialist would examine the actor. Before we left, Dr. Cao asked Jiang Wen to autograph three photographs of the doctor’s daughter and niece. It was nearly midnight. They were typical Chinese pictures: two tiny girls staring at the camera with startling animosity. On the back of each photo, the actor wrote: “Jiang Wen—the fifth and sixth vertebrae.”

DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP,
Jiang Wen’s second effort as director, is set in rural Hebei province, in 1945—the final year of the Japanese occupation. Like the Cultural Revolution, this sensitive period tended to be portrayed in set ways. Chinese films showed the brutality of the Japanese, as well as the heroic resistance of everyday people. There were staple heroes, like Wang Erxiao, the Chinese shepherd boy who led Japanese troops into an ambush.

In Jiang Wen’s film, the war shrinks to a single Chinese village and a single Japanese garrison, isolated together in the remote countryside. The movie opens with a sex scene: a peasant named Ma Dasan is having an affair with a young widow. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door, and an anonymous Chinese resistance soldier delivers a Japanese prisoner and his interpreter. The men are bound; Ma is instructed to interrogate the prisoners and keep them hidden from the local Japanese garrison. Terrified by the responsibility, Ma, who is played by Jiang Wen, asks his fellow villagers to help.

Instead of working together, the villagers bicker over petty issues: whether
Ma should be sleeping with the widow, how much flour the wealthiest woman in town has hoarded. Virtually every character is motivated by self-interest, greed, stubbornness, or cowardice. The Japanese prisoner, who is initially determined to die honorably, quickly loses his pride, and eventually the villagers feel sorry for the man. They end up trading him to the Japanese garrison for six cartloads of flour. In celebration, the occupiers and the occupied meet for a banquet, which is interrupted by the news that Japan has surrendered. In an escalating panic of fear and shame, the Japanese soldiers slaughter the unarmed villagers.

During the filming of
Devils on the Doorstep
, Jiang Wen refused to shoot outtakes. If a small part of a scene was unacceptable, he insisted on reshooting the entire thing from the beginning. In the film industry, this practice is unheard of, and Jiang Wen reportedly used every roll of Kodak black-and-white movie film that was available in China—five hundred thousand feet, or roughly five times the amount required for the average feature film. The rural set could be reached only by boat, and the actors worked in brutal cold. There were local distractions: one village sued another over who had the right to lease land to the film production company. The movie cost an estimated five million dollars, twice the original budget, and it was two hours and forty-four minutes long. Even when it was victorious at Cannes, most critics thought that it needed another edit. Internationally, it was released in only nine countries, and nobody in China ever saw it in a public theater. When I interviewed people who had worked on the film, they invariably asked to speak off the record, because of the political problems.

Before traveling to Xinjiang, I visited the location in rural Hebei where
Devils on the Doorstep
had been filmed. From Beijing, it was a five-hour drive, followed by a thirty-minute boat ride; the set was located on the banks of Panjiakou Reservoir. It consisted of a dozen houses surrounded by rugged mountains and a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall.

The village had been constructed solely for the movie. In China, where labor and materials were cheap, there wasn’t a specialty industry for set design: directors simply used real things. Near the Flaming Mountains, one of the horseback injuries had occurred when a log fell on an actor’s leg while he was riding. On a Hollywood set, the object would have been made of Styrofoam, but in China they just used a real log. At the Panjiakou Reservoir, all of the houses were made of granite, brick, and tile; they had working fireplaces and stoves. In a country where so much was
jiade
—knockoff brands, shoddy restorations of ancient structures, fresh paint on the façades of old buildings—the film sets were real. Sometimes they lasted longer than the movies themselves.

It had been two years since
Devils on the Doorstep
had been filmed, and nobody was living in the film set; the soil on that side of the reservoir was too rocky for farming. But peasants from a village across the water were trying to turn the place into a tourist attraction. They had set up a ticket gate and charged about seventy-five cents for admission. When I purchased my ticket, the man at the gate had nothing nice to say about Jiang Wen.

“He’s a swindler,” the old man said. “He was supposed to pay us a hundred thousand yuan for the use of the land, but he didn’t. Also, they borrowed some tools that they didn’t return.”

I went to the nearby village, where a number of peasants had appeared in the movie. Jiang Wen liked casting both professional actors and average people, because of the way it changed the dynamics on the set. A Hong Kong film consultant had explained to me that this strategy made the movie “less fictionalized, more real,” and this certainly seemed true, at least from the perspective of the villagers. One woman named Zhang Fuhong told me proudly that she had been handpicked by Jiang Wen and his advisors. “They chose me for a big scene because of my long hair,” she said proudly. She was twenty-five years old; when I interviewed her, she was making dumplings in her kitchen. She said she had liked Jiang Wen because he was friendly. In the movie’s pivotal scene, the woman had been killed by the Japanese. “I was the one who tried to run away at the end,” she said.

On a footpath heading back to the reservoir, I met another peasant woman who had also been killed in the movie. “I was a little scared,” she admitted. She told me that she had been impressed by Jiang Wen’s high standards. “There was one scene that they spent days filming, and he still didn’t accept it,” she said.

None of the villagers had seen the finished movie. They had only watched some clips on the monitor, during the filming, and their sense of the plot was incomplete. They didn’t realize that Jiang Wen’s character had also been killed, because those scenes had been filmed elsewhere. Many of the peasants weren’t even aware that
Devils on the Doorstep
had been banned. One woman said that she didn’t understand why it hadn’t appeared on television yet. The few tourists who stopped by were confused: they knew that a Jiang Wen movie had been made there, and they knew that there had been a problem, but they didn’t understand exactly what had happened.

The only person who seemed to know everything was a twelve-year-old boy named Zhou Baohong. When I traveled in the countryside, I sometimes ran into kids like him: well-spoken, knowledgeable, and obsessed with things beyond the village. If a foreigner appeared, such children latched on immedi
ately. Invariably their conversation included long descriptions of recent examination scores, as well as the odds of getting into a good high school. If I left my phone number, they called me at regular intervals for weeks and sometimes years. Those kids always reminded me of William Jefferson Foster.

Dressed in a filthy blue suit, Zhou Baohong was trying to earn extra money on the weekends by serving as a guide for the movie set. I hired him, and he took me on a tour of all the abandoned houses and objects. He knew how much each prop had cost—he pointed out a fake tree made from cement, which had cost six hundred yuan to make and another two hundred to transport. An extra tower on the Great Wall had cost one hundred thousand yuan. (Jiang Wen hadn’t been satisfied with the real Great Wall.) The boy took me to the empty home of Jiang Wen’s character, and then we paused by a small clearing. “This was the killing field,” the boy said solemnly. “All the villagers died here.”

I asked what had happened to the movie itself.

“Jiang Wen didn’t go through our nation’s Cultural Bureau for approval,” the boy said. “Then he went to France and won a prize. So our nation’s government banned it.” The boy hadn’t seen the finished film, but he said he knew why it had been censored. “The peasants didn’t resist,” he said. “There was no Red Army, no Workers’ Army, no guerillas—none of them showed up. That’s the problem with the movie.”

AFTER JIANG WEN
won at Cannes, the Chinese media kept silent—always a bad sign in the People’s Republic. The ban was never officially proclaimed, although two mysterious documents were leaked to Web sites. Supposedly, they had come from the Film Bureau. One was entitled “Propaganda Briefing No. 28,” and it noted that the government was “suspending Jiang Wen for all film and TV-related activities inside China.”

In China, all movies had to be cleared twice: first at the script stage, and then again after filming. The second leaked document—“Comments from the Film Censorship Committee”—identified twenty specific places in which Jiang Wen had changed his script without permission. The sex scene was inappropriate: “The strong imagery and explicit sound stimulates the sensory organs in a vulgar manner.” The committee also complained about the end of the film, which showed the Kuomintang controlling postwar China without resistance from the villagers: “It severely distorts the history. It doesn’t achieve the goal of criticizing and sneering at the KMT.”