Winter Story

The camera spies on the mass of people in the streets, stations, squares and markets in an average poor suburb of the metropolis Beijing, that has outgrown itself. It takes a while before it’s clear who has been captured by the camera, as if it was a chance protagonist for a documentary. Who he is and where he comes from will never be clear. He sells clothes in the street, as many around him do, illegally in an unregulated business.
One evening, he meets a girl and it clicks between them. She is a prostitute and we don’t know much about her either. People without a past or roots. Here, love is sex, sex here is an animal urge and yet a human necessity. The relationship looks uneasy from the start; it would be much more simple if their love, like everything, was for sale, marketable. Because they expect something of each other anyway.
As in so much interesting new cinema, Winter Story plays with the cutting edge between documentary and fiction. It’s a tragic love story with surprisingly open sex scenes by Chinese standards. The acting is so convincingly natural, partly thanks to be hand-held camera, that the images almost acquire a voyeuristic charge. On the documentary side, Zhu takes time to portray the way of life, eating and working of the new urban masses. And that in itself is enough to make Winter Story a fascinating document. (GT)