Xin Yukun’s second film in the director’s seat is set amongst the stark mountains which hem in Baotou, an industrial city in Mongolia, where the intense mining of natural mineral resources has transformed the mountainside pasturelands into an inhospitable desert.
The film tackles a variety of challenging themes, like the kidnapping of children, the destruction of nature and the arrogance of the newly rich to dominate, placing them into a range of filmic registers that range from drama to the thriller to action films, with some elements even calling to mind the fantasy genre, despite the narrative remaining rooted in a brutal reality.
The story opens with a boy bringing his goats to pasture. The peace and calm of this scene is immediately disrupted by a scuffle inside a mine, during which one of the miners is told that his son has gone missing. Zhang Baomin is a man of solid principles, but he ends up in fistfights with all and sundry; he has been mute since biting his own tongue during a youthful punch-up: he does, however, manage to make himself understood, and he is feared and admired in the village thanks to his stance in having refused to sell his land to the mining speculators. In the brawl that followed, he ended up blinding the butcher and owner of the only restaurant in the village. Meat – goat meat, but it inevitably leads to the metaphor of human flesh – is a recurrent theme in the film, using very graphic images in which the camera lingers on close-ups of butchered flesh, sliced up, used as an instrument of torture and consumed in an almost barbaric way, to emphasis the brutality of the environment the story is set in.
Baomin immediately returns to the village and begins hunting high and low for his missing son, initially suspecting the butcher, to whom he is still paying compensation for his missing eye. His meanderings lead him to another mine, and the camera in a long shot shows him small and defenseless on the bare, interminable mountains. There too, the miners are in a battle with the new owner, who wants to fire them all. Baomin ends up fighting alongside them, and in the end is taken to the mine’s owner, Chang Wannian, a brutal landowner and a corrupt blackmailer, who has a deep passion for goat meat and a very dangerous hobby: archery. Chang Wannian is being investigated by the police, who have already arrested his lawyer – Xu Wenjie, a weak, unhappy man, who, after having been abandoned by his wife, allows himself to be corrupted by Chang, but hates both himself and his client.
The destinies of the three men meet when Chang, convinced that the lawyer has documents that could help prove his innocence, kidnaps his young daughter; a series of coincidences lead Baomin onto the tracks of the kidnappers, but they blackmail him, promising him to get his son back to him in exchange for Xu’s daughter…
The three men could not be less like each other, and this diversity – one shared by contemporary China’s social classes – is reflected in the physical environments they move about in: Baomin’s house is almost a shed, the lawyer has an elegant but soulless apartment, and an office that oozes ostentatiously vulgar wealth for Chang. But something they do have in common is an almost animal-like survival instinct, managing to concentrate their efforts on saving their skins or those of their children, something that makes them immune to the suffering of others. The only moment in which we perceive a sense of human solidarity is when the butcher blinded by Baomin helps him, not only in the name of shared fatherhood – the butcher’s son is a minor character who occasionally punctuates the story as if in a Greek tragedy covered by a mask on his face – but also for class solidarity. Indeed, if there is a message to be inferred from the film, it is that even when faced with disaster, the rich always come out of it better than the poor…
The film’s title alludes not only to the wrath of the mute miner, but also of all those who are taken advantage of and of the natural world ravaged by the greed of humans, exemplified by a spectacular and moving final image.
Xin Yukun
Xin Yukun (1984, Inner Mongolia). A Beijing Film Academy graduate in 2008, he made his directing debut in 2014 with the film The Coffin in the Mountain, which picked up the prize for Best Film and Best Director at the FIRST Youth Film Festival in Xining, and was then presented as part of the Critics’ Week programme at the Venice Film Festival. In 2016 he was one of three Asian directors to participate in the omnibus film Distance produced by Anthony Chen of Singapore. Wrath of Silence was the closing film of the FIRST Youth Film Festival 2017.
FILMOGRAPHY
2014 – The Coffin in the Mountain
2016 – Distance
2017 – Wrath of Silence
Maria Barbieri