Troubled Laughter

One of the first films from the Fourth Generation, Troubled Laughter exemplifies the urgency, and sometimes brute, earnest force of the earliest phase of these film makers’ engagement with history and film art.
Earnest reporter Fu Bin’s naïve dedication to truth sets him immediately at odds with his opportunistic colleagues, not to mention the hypocritical officials who shamelessly pervert his journalistic ethics for ideological purposes during the Cultural Revolution. A dignified surgeon, forced to work as a janitor in his hospital, is ritually humiliated in front of Fu Bin, who has to write an article supporting the surgeon’s persecutors. Fu’s professional and ethical conflicts eventually threaten both his work and family relationships, while his mental struggle breaks through to the film’s discursive level.
The film plays with slow and stop motion, disjunctive sound, abstract colour effects, rapid-fire montage, and the radically outlandish fantasy sequences. Most remarkable are the excursions into dream space that break out of the film story, including a hideously hilarious Nazi/S&M banquet of ghoulish officials.
Yang’s intellectualised absurdism prefigures the post-socialist cinema of Huang Jianxin, though their cinema is more direct, constructing a web of anxiety that can barely contain a moral conscience splintering under political attack. (SK)