Ever see this film?
I’ve been watching and watching and rewatching this 2016 Chinese tale, fable perhaps, for several days this week. It’s in 30-day rotation with as many films on mubi.com, where each day one is added and another dropped.
Years ago, I used to stay up late on Saturday nights to watch Chinese movies from an L.A. television station. The themes ranged from silk production and processing to infidelity and family feuds to pre-WWII-war torture and oppression by Japanese invaders. Now, as the U.S. is ceding its global dominance and relevance to China, exposing ourselves to the culture and its trappings and expressions seems more urgent than ever.
Crosscurrent takes us on a month-long journey of a cargo barge up the Yangtze River. The boat’s master seems to have a girl in every port, but in his brief, usually overnight and almost silent, encounters, we see that each young woman looks exactly like the others (or is she the same person with different personalities, popping up at different places and stages?). If that isn’t poetic enough for you, from time to time what appear to be snippets of Chinese poetry are displayed in Mandarin characters (and English subtitles) across the screen. These come from a mysterious book of poems driving the whole story, each of which is named for a place along the river, now submerged by dam-induced flooding. Political at that.
My watch-partner sets a high bar, insisting that anything we see rise to a certain level of writing. But I can often happily ingest anything that provides the right visual intrigue or conceit or interest. And Crosscurrent is visual in spades. Stunning panoramas of the river and rivercraft and the surrounding mountains rise out of the mist. We see harbor scenes flit by through moving windows. The cold and clammy feel of river life is interrupted by bursts of heat; cool and warm light is mixed unexpectedly in scene after scene. Dialogue is sparse, perhaps thankfully. But most of the audio track is mesmerizing, mostly consisting of the sounds of the harbor and the waves and the boats’ mechanical noises; occasionally you realize that music makes a subtle presence in places. Much like the way that I pause to dwell on a singular visual or to make a screen capture to ponder at a future time, I find myself closing my eyes just to take in the aural intensities.
Some of the story elements at first may seem heavy-handed or over-the-top or simplistic or even pretentious, but none of that really matters for me. Admittedly, I was clearly more smitten early on with Crosscurrent than was my watch-partner, but now she also wants to re-watch, particularly for the on-screen lines of poetry. I urge you to give it a whirl, whether in the little time that it will be available at Mubi, or if you can find it anywhere else, perhaps at an arthouse-oriented site. After my viewing sessions finish, I will probably search online for reviews — my usual practice is to avoid reviews beforehand to keep myself in an open state and to defer any disappointment and dispute. I did come to the film knowing that it was a Berlin film festival contender, and that it used the services of a renowned Taiwanese cinematographer, but I know little else — except that Crosscurrent was for me a mesmerizing visual and aural experience. And I’m finding something new every time I watch.
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Aha! Here’s a trailer I found after a few viewing sessions, so I might not need to process and share my screenshots:
With a little more digging, I find that the DVD/Blu-Ray (but apparently not for online viewing) is available at Amazon: