Chongqing Blues by Wang Xiaoshuai

Bit by bit, with the precious help of cinema, I gathered information on China’s spiritual state. Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chongqing Blues greatly revives the hints of sadness and emptiness I had a hint of. The foggy and chaotic life of Chongqing is the perfect setting for this poem of disorientation.

As the plot unfolds, with its illusory detective intrigue and emotional outbursts, one can say that the actual story is merely a framework for the intricate state of heart piece the director is trying to give way to. A longtime absent father, Lin, comes home to unearth the past and find out more about the death of his son, whom he left sixteen years ago. In the process, he encounters an ex-wife now full of hatred, an old friend, and those few people who knew his son, including the cop who gunned him down.

The father feeds on their stories and slowly reconstructs the life he gave up on when he went away, sailing to nowhere. What he really obtains though is not a past, but an emotional outline, which he seems to have missed out on his entire life. Somehow this man is ‘enjoying’ his guilt and heavy thoughts.

However, later on, Wang feels the need to go deeper inside these mixed feelings, which makes the film feel a bit long. This partly eases the tension: the veil of pressure and complicated feelings he managed to throw in at first. Eventually, just as the title predicts, this film is a blue, poetic approach to the unsettled nature of human beings.

By Miruna Vasilescu