A family drama that’s part modern romance, part urban mystery, Lost, Indulgence is FEFF regular Zhang Yibai’s finest, most fully realized film yet.
Wu Tao (Hong Kong everyman Eric Tsang, in a small but key role) is a married cabbie with one son Xiao Chuan (newcomer Tan Jianci), living in Chongqing, China. Early one morning, we see him pick up provocatively dressed, ultra-leggy bar hostess Su Dan (HK singing/acting star Karen Mok); then we see his cab plunge off the side of a road into the Yangtze River. Wu’s body is not recovered, but Su Dan winds up in a hospital with a fractured leg. There, Wu’s wife Fan Li (Jiang Wenli, a popular mainland TV and film star) and Xiao Chuan visit her, and assume the responsibility for her convalescence. When hospital costs mount, Fan Li, who works both as a factory doctor and part-time vet, decides to move the relatively immobile Su into their home. There, Su slowly, grumpily recovers, demanding complete service from Fan, while Xiao Chuan acts alternately sullen and obsessed with the new arrival. Fan herself struggles with this newly configured artificial family, and with a feeling of incomplete mourning for her lost husband. She soon meets Hong Kong psychiatrist Xiao Yi (Eason Chan, one of Hong Kong’s most reliable young actors) who appears to offer her an outlet for her repressed feelings of romance and guilt. Xiao Chuan develops suspicions about the circumstances around his father’s death; and at the same time is pulled into a something-like-intimacy with Su Dan, impelled by his growing feelings for her, an almost irresistibly alluring woman at least ten years his senior.
Out of these variously tense and reconfigured relationships, director Zhang crafts a fascinating film of themes and variations, combining and recombining his lead characters in scenes of relatively sparse dialogue: scenes whose emotional, dramatic power comes from Zhang’s mastery of framing, colour, and light. Chongqing city’s dark aquatic colourscape, largely soft blue-green-grey, with highlights of yellow, forms a beautiful backdrop to the work of his cast, some of Hong Kong and China’s finest younger actors. Jiang Wenli is especially impressive as the bereaved and frustrated wife: her body language and facial expressions evoke a richly characterized, believable portrait of a woman who feels trapped between an undigested past and an unimagined future. Karen Mok provides another powerful, sharply realized performance as a contradictorily flamboyant yet introspective Su Dan, and the male members of the cast all create memorable, slightly offbeat characters who inhabit this strangely skewed yet recognizable world.
Zhang eschews closeups, using the long takes and relatively distant framing borrowed from contemporary art house cinema, but transfusing it with his own sense of vibrant urban rhythms, animating it with a romantic, contemporary vibe that propels the film towards a more mainstream audience. That’s Zhang Yibai’s trick, and one that many Chinese directors would be well advised to study: sneaking art film values into commercial cinema, synthesizing the vibrant visual world of the best of recent Chinese cinema with a shrewd sensibility attuned to the exigencies of contemporary China’s ever-more commercialized film industry.
Shelly Kraicer