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Two Chinese Films: The King of Masks and Not One Less Wu Tianming’s The King of Masks is set in the 1930’s in a riverside town in Sichuan with cobble-stone streets, lanterns and lattice-windowed teahouses. The film begins with the pageantry and festivities of the Lunar New Year: amid the fireworks and the sound of drums and gongs, the itinerant mask magician, Wang (played by Zhu Xu) is regaling the assembled townsfolk with his riveting performance. He is an old man who plies the waterways of the province in a skiff practicing his precious art of bian lian or “mask-changing.” His skill, carried down as a family secret over many generations, involves the deft and imperceptible changing of masks of every color, design and variety, at lightning speed. Wang (the surname is a play on words, since the same Chinese character also means “King”) is without heir to this family treasure. One of his admirers, Liang Sulan (Zhao Zhigang), a successful opera actor and female impersonator of the Buddhist deity Guan Yin, invites him to join his own troupe, and when he refuses, urges him to find himself an heir to inherit his art. Wang ends up paying ten dollars on the black market to a father who has fallen on hard times for an eight-year-old boy (only male heirs were allowed in Chinese tradition). Thus begins the unfolding of the touching story of growing affection between Wang and his disciple/grandchild, nicknamed “Doggie,” played by Zhou Renying. Obviously the boy has been abused and Wang is the first parent who treats him with genuine love and care. It soon transpires that Doggie has a secret which, once revealed to Wang, puts a severe strain on the relationship. But the close bond between the two survives this and eventually, in Wang’s greatest hour of need, his disciple comes through for him with true loyalty and courage. Director Wu Tianming explores in his film three interwoven themes with candor and sensitivity: the low status of girls and women in traditional China; the way actors and performers were relegated to the lower rungs of the social ladder, however much their talents were admired; and the helplessness of ordinary people in the face of the cruel and arbitrary exercise of power. But the picture of society that is presented here is not an inconsolably bleak one: ultimately, basic human decency and compassion ensure that the right thing is done, and toward the end of the film, Liang says to Wang,” Ours is a cold world, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put some warmth into it.” Zhu Xu and Zhou Renying deserve full credit for superb acting in their leading roles, as does the photographer, whose camera has captured the serene beauty of the dark green waters and mist-shrouded mountains of Sichuan. The film is a DVD in Mandarin with English subtitles. It has won a number of international awards. In Not one Less, director Zhang Yimou (who won critical acclaim for his film Raise the Red Lantern) paints an unflinchingly frank portrait of rural poverty and its effect on education. A thirteen-year-old peasant girl, Wei Minzhi (same name in real life), arrives at a desperately poor and remote village in northern China to be substitute teacher for a month. She hasn’t finished high school, is only a few years older than the twenty-eight students in her class and is greeted with skepticism by Teacher Gao, for whom she is substituting. The school building is a ramshackle single-storey mud-and-brick house with tiny adjacent teacher’s quarters. And Gao’s own curriculum seems to be limited to writing set texts on the blackboard for the kids to copy, day after day. He leaves her with the exhortation to keep the class intact during his absence and not lose any students. At first, Teacher Wei is overwhelmed by the discipline problems presented by her class, in particular by the arch trouble-maker Zhang Huike (same name in real life). But when the head of the village drops by the school to present her with the fait accompli that, Ming Xinhong, the best athlete in the class, is to be immediately transferred to a city sports school, she stands up to him and insists on keeping her promise to Gao to “retain all the students, not one less.”  Her wishes are overridden. What’s more, Zhang is forced by dire family circumstances to abandon his studies and go to the city to work for wages. This time she rises to the challenge by mobilizing her class to raise money for bus fare for her to go to the city to bring Zhang back to school. This involves getting students to do calculations on the blackboard to work out how much they need to raise, in effect having an arithmetic class to solve real life problems. Eventually, when she reaches the city, she discovers that Zhang has escaped and disappeared into the swirling humanity. She pounds the pavements in search of him, tries to use the city’s public address system, writes notices in ink to be posted, and nothing works. It is suggested to her that an ad on TV might be the only solution. At the local TV station, she is barred from entry by the petty bureaucracy of a clerk. She uses every ounce of perseverance, assertiveness and strength in her thin body to get the attention of a sympathetic station manager, and in the end, her tenacious efforts come to fruition, having triumphed over seemingly impossible odds. This film, a DVD in Mandarin with English subtitles, won an award at the 1999 Sao Paolo International Film Festival. Jeffrey Tao Return to Home