This Winter

This first feature film by the young director Zhong Hua is divided into four chapters, which capture the last days in service of four members of the Beijing police. Each of them wishes to mark their departure in a particular way, namely by giving blood, losing their virginity, finally mounting the guard or singing for their fellow companions. Here, we witness the meticulous chronicle of a China rarely shown in film. Crude, chaotic, lost between opposite references and desires, endlessly talkative, these four characters embody something untamed and hopeless: youngsters' heads full of entangled ideologies standing for a future nobody yet knows about. The frontal approach, the camera staying close as if an accomplice to its subjects, makes these strange images, devoid of any folklore, all the more disturbing and uneasy to place. It is the enigma of a whole generation whose life already seems worn out and defeated. Youth at a time of reckoning of their past hopes, unattainable dreams. (J-P. R.)