A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, March 17, 2025

Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)

Zhu Yilong in Only the River Flows

Cast: Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Hou Tianlai, Tong Linkai, Kang Chunlei, Wang Jianyu, Zishi Moxi, Liu Baisha, Yang Cao, Zhou Qingyung. Screenplay: Kang Chunlei, Wei Shujun, based on a novel by Yu Hua. Cinematography: Zhiyuan Chengma. Art direction: Zhang Menglun. Film editing: Matthieu Laclau. 

Moody, absorbing, and sometimes enigmatic film about a detective (Zhu Yilong) haunted by a series of murders in a town in rural China. Wei Shujun's direction and Zhiyuan Chengma's cinematography make the most of the gloomy, oppressive setting. 

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