Aftershock

The PRC's movie industry has produced many art-house favourites; its mass-market spectaculars haven't earned similar international attention. Aftershock might have done so. Let's see, after January 2011, whether China's official Oscar nominee makes it to the shortlist (in competition, among around 80 others, with Hong Kong's Echoes of the Rainbow and Taiwan's Monga). [None of them reached the longlist.]

Aftershock is the first major commercial IMAX movie made outside the US. The 2010 PRC-IMAX co-production (the first of a contracted three) dramatises the aftermath of the disastrous 1976 Tangshan earthquake and adds a contemporary reference to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's the top Chinese box-office grosser, quickly leaping ahead of The Founding of a Republic.

240,000 people died in Tangshan. If Hollywood had recreated the mass tragedy, the movie would have innumerable sub-plots catering to all major demographic groups, age ranges, races and sexual interests. In China, director Feng Xiaogang focuses exclusively on one mother and her young twin children, and there are moments when a viewer aches for a sub-plot or two to lighten the mood and present a few fresh faces.

This movie is a champion exploitative tear-jerker. It's a 10,000-tissue weepie in which the children's father dies in the earthquake, the distraught mother is faced with a Sophie's Choice, the son loses an arm, the daughter survives unknowingly and is adopted by married PLA soldiers in the earthquake rescue teams. The mother cannot forgive herself for having made her choice, neither can the daughter, and the audience is frequently given emotional dialogue, heart-rending situations and musical prompts all designed to squeeze its tear ducts, mercilessly.

The mother and daughter are played wonderfully well (by Xu Fan, the director' wife, and the very busy Zhang Jingchu respectively), considering that a forgivable reaction to each of their stiffly self-absorbed characters would be to scream and demand that they stop being somewhat tedious self-sacrificing egocentrics. But if they did, the screenplay would be a lot shorter and more rational.

The rest of the cast is admirable (especially Chen Diaoming as the adoptive father), as are the cinematography, special effects (directed by ubiquitous Phil Jones), costumes and subtle government propaganda (on behalf of the PLA, Tangshan and China's modernisation). Director Feng has a successful track record, progressing from Chinese TV series in the 90s to writing and directing many mainstream movie hits (Happy Funeral, World Without Thieves, If You Are the One). He also directed Banquet, produced and directed Assembly, produced Cellphone and has been a movie actor.

IMAX and his co-owned Chinese production company will be happy with him; his epic had a reported budget of less than US$25 million. Its earnings in China and international markets will more than compensate for its likely inability to obtain any wide distribution in the USA. A few scenes in Vancouver, where the bitter daughter somehow (unexplained) ends up married to a Caucasian lawyer, were probably designed to help its entry to the Canadian market, both on IMAX and regular screens.

[The excellent review by Kevin Ma in lovehkfilm.com is fiercely critical of Feng's commercial and political considerations.]