In the Wild Mountains

Before Fifth-Generation films set the template for Chinese politico-melodramas of rural woman oppressed by patriarchy, films like this one enjoyed a relatively unburdened thematic freedom to explore unexpected dimensions of the genre. Yan Xueshu’s film is in fact a husband-swapping drama, though structurally it is closer to comedy. Two ill-matched couples eek out a subsistence level existence in the early 1980s in impoverished Shaanxi province. Lusty, energetic Guilan is beset with a rather passive and possibly impotent husband, Huihui. And delicate, traditionally minded Qiurong has just separated from her husband, Hehe, whose money-earning schemes, inevitably collapsing in debts, have left them even more than usually impoverished. The film teases gently with the possibility of each woman finding her proper match, as each character – all fully rounded, subtly shaded individuals – searches for domestic solutions that reflect their economic and erotic aspirations.
Yan’s fluent cinematic language employs shooting in depth, controlled long takes, masterful framing design and extremes of lighting. Daringly sexualizing the new capitalist energies bubbling down from above (it’s government policy, after all, to promote Hehe’s newly energized entrepreneurial zeal), the film humanizes and physicalizes social change with a Rabelasian verve that puts concrete, desiring bodies right at the centre of a rejuvenated, humanized social realism. (SK)