The Alley

The Alley infuses mainstream narrative cinema with avant-garde stylistic play with a result as vertiginously disconcerting as it is giddily exhilarating. The director, Yang Yanjing, plays a film director (is he perhaps playing himself, or a version of himself, making this very film?) who films an aspiring screenwriter (Guo Kaimin) pitching his script to a director, also played by Yang: if you’re counting, this is a film within a film within a film. As they discuss the incomplete screenplay, the film (which film? we’re frequently, delightfully uncertain exactly which of the three levels of 'film' in the diegesis we are located at) visualizes all the possibilities. Guo Kaimin and female star Zhang Yu - playing a young woman disguised as a man to hide from her Red Guard persecutors - became the hot romantic leading couple of the early 80s. Though, with Zhang’s ambiguously staged cross-dressing scenes, the film plays daringly with cross-gender sexual attractions. Yang masters his experimental impulses (already manifest in Troubled Laughter, 1979) infusing them into the film’s visual style, narrative structure and implied ontological dimensions. As the film fractures into three endings, it pushes as far towards narrative experimentalism as popular Chinese cinema allows. A strange masterpiece of fourth generation film making. (SK)