Extramarital affairs continues to be the hot topic among modern Chinese urbanites. China’s films, official and unofficial, have responded with alacrity and enthusiasm, satisfying the audience’s curiosity to at least look at, if not experience, this new phenomenon of modern urban Chinese life for themselves. First time director Xie Dong’s The Coldest Day gives them an eyeful.
Good-looking lawyer Zhang Xuezhi (Xu Yajun) seems to have it all: a beautiful wife, cute daughter, lavish apartment, fancy car. But his wife Xinmei (Hu Jingfan, the star of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s award-winning Springtime in a Small Town), a frustrated Beijing opera singer, is having a torrid workplace affair with handsome young opera hunk Li Bao (Xiao Long). Yajun inevitablly discovers them, but not before he encounters the aggressively sexy Xiao Baicai (played by the sublime Qin Hailu, star of Durian Durian and Chicken Poets), the wife of one of his jailed clients. Baicai quickly makes it clear that she’s far more interested in her husband’s lawyer than in his freedom.
Out of this amorous quadrilateral, The Coldest Day fashions a cool, quiet, introspective mood piece. Shot on DV, the film’s colours are gorgeously muted: a cool black/white/brown colour scheme keeps our attention locked on the inner worlds of the protagonists, all of whom struggle with a kind of isolation and anomie that locks their feelings deep inside. Director Xie (who has trained as assistant director under Zhang Yimou) has an admirably firm command of style and mood. Long, virtuosic takes convey achingly lonely moments, black comedy paints the entire dysfunctional family’s encounter in a hospital corridor. Xie Dong gives urban Chinese cinema a new modern voice, one that eschews “local colour” and instead makes a bold claim to participate, on an equal status, with world cinema at its most cosmopolitan.
Shelly Kraicer