In today’s Beijing, where the economic boom seems to have made everyone’s life frenetic, dynamic and flourishing, in truth there are many youngsters who are left behind; oppressed, suffocated, frustrated, almost invisible amongst the crowds whose lives are lived amongst injustices and doling out abuse. The day, among the hutong of Beijing, San Bao loses track of his dog Lucky, he risks ending up in jail for a minor street disturbance, and on the same day he gets summarily fired from his job for having turned up late.
Chengcheng, his ex-girlfriend, is pregnant by the man she left him for five months earlier. It seems like the perfect day for San Bao to drown his sorrows in alcohol after having even failed in his attempt to get hit by a moving train by standing on the wrong tracks. That evening, by that point totally drunk, he chews up a glass in his mouth. Youzi, the singer in the band at the local bar, comes to his rescue. San Bao awakens in a hospital bed in pain with his mouth bandaged. By his side is his best friend, Wang Ming, who works as a hotel parking attendant, and Xiao Shi, a poet and dancer, obsessed by his image and with a tendency to rely too heavily on plastic surgery. The hospital costs are prohibitive for San Bao, who decides to discharge himself earlier than advised. Thus begins a long period of silence. His journey home, not one of the happiest moments of his life, is torture. But life itself decides to rupture his internal suffering the next day when his elderly landlady informs him that the whole area will be demolished in the next few days and he will, therefore, have to find new lodgings.
San Bao returns to the bar where the incident took place to get his cell phone back from Youzi, who had taken him to hospital. There are other characters who hang out in the bar, other people who, like San Bao, want to stand out from the anonymity of the masses: Er Mao, the guitarist of the band who, unscrupulously, ousts Youzi as the singer to have her place taken by his girlfriend Lingzi; Tao Hui, the barman who shares an apartment with Youzi, and whose mysterious past we will discover; Su Mo, who also lives with Youzi and Tao Hui, is seeing her office manager who, in a fit of cowardice, leaves her drunk and at the mercy of his own boss. San Bao, now homeless, first of all moves in with his friend Wang Ming who lives with his girlfriend Taozi, an aspiring actress. He then moves into Xiao Shi’s house. The main characters’ stories continue to meld, to overlap, to get increasingly complicated. The homeless San Bao’s roaming of the streets of Beijing reflects the instability and constant uncertainty of today’s youth in the vortex of a changing Beijing, a city that crushes those unable to adapt. The tales of San Bao, Youzi and Wang Ming echo the verse written by the poet amongst them, Xiao Shi, who never tires of reciting it. The modern and wealthy Beijing which today is bursting with glamour, luxury and prosperity, risks annihilating its poets, and a city without poetry is poorer than ever.
The four main characters are played by a cast of already notable young actors: Duan Bowen (San Bao) who we know from Lost, Indulgence by Zhang Yibai (2008) and more recently in the latest film by Feng Xiaogang, 1942; Sabrina Li Xinyun (You Zi) who previously starred in Little Red Flowers (2006) and Dada’s Dance (2008) by Zhang Yuan; Lü Yulai (Wang Min), much appreciated in Peacock (2005) by Gu Changwei, in Courthouse on Horseback (2006) by Liu Jie, and in the more recent The Last Supper (2012) by Lu Chuan.
Beijing Flickers, as Zhang Yuan declares, roots around in the past and finds inspiration in one of his first films, Beijing Bastards (1992). At that time, the art scene in Beijing boasted the aspirations and talent of artists of the calibre of Liu Xiaodong, appreciated on the international scene today, of musicians and songwriters like Cui Jian and Dou Wei, of screenwriters like Tang Danian who worked with the director to immortalise Beijing’s youth of the 1990s. Twenty years later, Zhang Yuan has come up with a more elaborate and demanding project in three phases, first Unspoiled Brats, then Beijing Flickers. The material gathered, the fruit of in-depth research including video interviews and photographs of hundreds of young people born in the 1980s, was included in the photography exhibition (first phase), inaugurated at the U.C.C.A. – Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing; the publication of a book (second phase) on the same subject, which then becomes animated in the form of this film (third phase), in the story of four protagonists representing ways, attitudes and situations which the director identified while working on the film. Udine Far East Film Festival, which presented the first two chapters of Zhang Yuan’s project in 2012 with the photography/video interview exhibition and the presentation of the book, will this year play host to the third and final chapter of the project.
Maria Ruggieri