Cycle index

Twilight Dancing

dir. Tian Gao, Joshua Tong / China 2008 / 94’

subtitles: Polish and English

New Horizons International Competition $e11.ou7! – Sell Out!, A Lake, Burrowing, Dazzle, Exhausted, Face, Helen, Hunger, Iréne, Mock up on Mu, Ne change rien, Oxygen, Spyder, Twilight Dancing Section index

Cast

Wang Luodan, Cheng Taishen, Liu Zhaoming

Film description

The film starts with a car pile-up sequence. Cars upside down, bodies in the street, shock, horror, blood. In this pandemonium, a red van arrives and takes people who are in quasi-somnambulist numbness from the crash area. The crash links the lives of four characters - the van's driver, a beautiful girl, her adoptive father and his son. The girl and the driver fall in love, making the older man obsessively jealous.

But the power of this puzzling film lies not in the melodramatic plot we have to reconstruct from fragmented scenes, but in the manner of telling the story, inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend. It is a collective portrait of people who are marked by psychical pain and love ecstasy at the same time - as if those two conditions were actually identical. This multidimensional mixture attacks the spectator with frames filled with human suffering intertwined with poetic images, as if taken straight from the main character's dream. It is worth mentioning that two Polish filmmakers who participated in the project, have contributed significantly to the sophisticated visual aspect of the film.

Piotr Kletowski