Evening Rain

Wu Yigong’s Evening Rain transmutes political protest into lyric poetry. A poet, Qiushi, is being transported on a Yangtze River boat to prison in Wuhan. It is during the Cultural Revolution and his unspecified ‘crimes’ are political. His wife has died and he has lost touch with his young daughter. One of his guards, a woman, is a doctrine-spouting Maoist, the other a taciturn veteran. A cross section of victims of the Cultural Revolution and bystanders populate their shared cabin. Their reactions are fear, defiance, or compassion to Qiushi’s presence. But the apparent schematization of the characters is completely undercut by Wu’s delicate, classically based style, which is limpidly clear and balanced. This film sings (its musical score by Gao Tian is one of the most beautiful in Chinese cinema), deploying a poeticism that supports a powerful melodramatic emotional structure while eschewing sentimentalism. There are, astonishingly, no bad guys in this film denouncing persecution as politics. Just an air of quietly powerful justice and courage that radiates from Qiushi and begins to breathe life into the dormant humanity of his captors. Looking back to pre-revolutionary cinematic lyricism and ahead to films like Zhang Ming’s quasi-lyrical Rainclouds Over Wushan, Wu’s cinema poem transcends tears through hope and the revival of classic aesthetic values. (SK)