Ann Hui, the prolific Hong Kong director, not well known in the United States, adds a serious biopic of Chinese writer Xiao Hong to her diverse movie portfolio. The Golden Era. (2014) served as the closing night film at the 2014 Venice Film Festival.  There are many reasons to see the movie, and one to make you think twice:  it is three hours long! That is a long time to sit in seats designed for barely 90 minutes, and with no intermission as a three hour opera grants.  It seems even longer without a car chase, shoot out or tension in the trenches.  The sheer beauty of the cinematography and learning about an important time in China’s history and of writers who were forebears of today’s impressive generation are great reasons to go.

Xiao Hung came to her brief golden era as a writer of widely read naturalistic fiction in the ten years of Japanese invasion and occupation of China. She ran from home in 1930 to escape an arranged marriage, became pregnant while unmarried and gave her child up. In extreme poverty she came to live with her first collaborator, Xiao Jun, in the Chinese version of Bohemian artists. Their first publication of short stories, Bashe (Arduous Journey) appeared in 1933.  She died before the war was over, in January, 1942, in occupied Hong Kong,  one of a small, but honored, coterie of modernizing fiction writers, dramatists and poets.  Included among them was the much better known Lu Xun, also represented in the movie. Coming from a disrupted childhood and constantly on the move to keep away from Japanese occupation, her writing drew from the proximity of her barely privileged life to the poverty around her, and centered strongly on women.  Perhaps her best known novel is The Field of Life and Death, 1935, available in a new translation by Howard Goldblatt.

The movie is a masterpiece of cinematography and lighting, from blue-lit interiors in impoverished urban apartment buildings to screen-wide scenes of gray bay water or terraced brown slopes. One breath taking scene pans slowly up a snow crusted building, in every shade of white, to then reveal the beautiful young Xiao Hong [Wei Tang, known for her role in Ang Lee’s 2007 Lust, Caution] looking out at the scene from a darkened window.  Not soon forgotten.  While the recently released Mr. Turner by Mike Leigh, impresses us with cinematic sunsets and marine scenes we view them almost with expectation: these are, after all, the famous painter’s inspiration and subject matter. The Golden Era, on the other hand, surprises us with equally stunning, unanticipated, vistas.

The actors, to a person, are beautiful, male and female.  In fact so beautiful as to be at times distracting – not to say confusing.  Hui makes use of the technique of direct address to the camera by those who knew her, recalling times and events they had in common, to which the mise-en-scene often cuts.  The confusing part is the agelessness of the friends.  Speaking, apparently years after her death, just one month shy of thirty years, they retain a luminescent, youthful beauty.  Our sense of time is scrambled more than once.

In fact, time, scrambled or forgotten, plays a puzzling role.  We hear, someway into the movie of the Japanese invasion of 1937, known now as the second Sino-Japanese War. 

While that certainly happened, and certainly affected the lives of Xiao Hong and other writers, it is also true the Japanese had invaded much earlier, in 1931, and occupied much of Manchuria, about which nothing is mentioned. This is the more surprising as Xiao Hong was from Harbin, in far north eastern China, which would have been aware of the occupiers from the early years.  More surprising is that her best known novel, Field of Life and Death, 1934, deals with peasant life under the occupation.  And most surprising is that she lived in Tokyo in 1936 for over a year.  Though mentioned in the film, nothing is made of the tension of living in the occupier’s country.  I, for one, am baffled.  How might this have happened?  What would a writer, having written of her countrymen’s sufferings, have thought? Why wouldn’t this be a point of dramatic conflict?

Triply strange is that Ann Hui, herself, is the daughter of a Manchurian-Chinese father and a Japanese mother, born in 1947, two years after the end of the war.  At the end of fighting, some one million Japanese soldiers were there and along with them many Japanese women. You’d think Hui would have a personal interest in this conflict of love and war. [For a stunning film representation of this place and time, see “A Soldier’s Prayer,” part three of Masaki Kobayashi’s great war time trilogy.]  It would have made an entirely different film, of course, had the focus shifted and tightened to such a story, but it is one which I would gladly sit through three more hours to see.

Hui’s style is the long, unflinching take, often static, as if we are sitting in a chair watching people in front of us.  Equally slow are dolly shots, out or in, giving us time to reflect on the scene or the characters in front of us.  In a closing death scene the camera holds the face, though not in extreme close up, for fully 35 seconds, a long time in movies.  The result is, at first, quite extra-ordinary, an invitation into a story-space of care and contemplation.  We adjust, recognizing it as as an uncommon experience, a welcome one, as being in a quiet room in the otherwise hurly-burly mansion of mainstream movies.  About two hours in, however, we being to wish she had taken up the scissors a bit sooner and a bit more often.  My sense was as I left, admiring what I had seen, that the movie might have been compressed by 30-45 minutes simply through judicious shortening of particularly generous shot times, without removing a scene.

It should be noted also that there is a double set of sub-titles, in English and Chinese, the later for  non-Mandarin speaking Chinese, I presume.

Screen magic happens when an auteur’s vision connects with the audience desired. Sometimes that takes a modification of the vision, without touching the essence.  I suspect many would be mesmerized by Ann Hui’s world with more acknowledgment of movie goers habits and expectations, or even were it billed as an intimate epic, with a twenty minute intermission.   As the recipient of Asian Film Maker of the Year award in 2014, Ann Hui, is certainly a cinematic force to be aware of.  A half a dozen of her multi-genre work are available on-line.  Perhaps  Goddess of Mercy (2004) or A Simple Life (2011), both with strong female characters, would be good to try.

For myself, I think I’ll turn to Xiao Hong’s stories, see how those who followed her, such as YiYun Li in her powerful The Vagrants,(2009) compares.