I. On the Screens of Lumiere
Woke up from a dream in which I was attempting
to account for Chinese actress Gong Li’s
odd beauty, which has to do with asymmetry,
I think…as if she had worked up her countenance –
had strategized a face to face the world
or wrested it in last-minute desperation
from the spent visages of two former beauties
who get along though are sometimes at odds,
not so much with each other (no fallout between
yin and yang or the two sides of a single coin),
but over how the world’s to be addressed,
and especially over the manner in which
persistence (and specifically feminine
persistence) will be harnessed to survive
through successive cycles of male incompetence
that result from men believing that they’re in charge…
or rather that they need to be in charge.
The left side (the side we see on the left, that is)
is the side of both dignity and privilege –
privilege at times unearned, undeserved.
The subaltern right side so chips away at it…
or humbles it, let’s say…that dignity prevails.
A paired identity, a coupled face
that reappears through successive incarnations –
from film to film, from dynasty to dynasty,
through historical calms and upheavals
as Chinese humanity carries itself out,
with cursory glances at the rest of a world
of which it’s only now and then aware…
less so than Gong’s halved faces are of each other.
Let’s call these two halved selves (or selved halves) Zuo and You
(“dzwo” and “yo”) – Left and Right in Mandarin.
Two sides of a face, aspects of a character…
persona, rather – a helixed persona
emerging through an evolving series
of inhabitants on the screens of Lumière.
II. Breaking the Silence
A good film to start with is Breaking the Silence
from 2000, directed by Sun Zhou.
Liying, a single mother living in Beijing,
struggles to raise her hearing-impaired son Zheng Da.
As with most of Gong’s heroines, Liying
is bound on a mission from which she never swerves –
namely, to get her son into a decent school.
To accomplish this, she quits her stable
factory job so as to have more time to spend
with her son and teach him the rudiments of speech
he must obtain before he enters school.
She does so at significant financial risk
and must look for odd jobs in order to scrape by,
including one with a former classmate
riskily selling novels on the black market.
She also must cope with the constant bullying
that Zheng Da receives from other children.
In one incident, the boy’s hearing aid is smashed
as he defends himself against group ridicule.
Liying’s vicissitudes as a struggling
mother are punctuated by her relations
with men, including her selfish former husband
who divorced her over her apparent
inability to produce a “normal” son
and who initiates equivocal displays
of paternal love on weekend visits
with Zheng Da. One day he is killed in a car crash,
the latest casualty in the pantheon
of heedless loser men in Gong Li’s films.
More treacherous than the husband is the lowlife
who hires Liying to do housecleaning then attempts
to rape her after offering her cash
to gratify his spontaneous need for sex.
A silent dialogue materializes
between Zuo and You in this painful scene –
Left and Right – as Liying struggles in self-defense.
We don’t know the exact outcome of the struggle
until later in a sort of flashback.
We know that Liying has engaged in pleasantries
with this jerk, similar to many jerks that Zuo
has trusted in prior incarnations,
and that it’s been left to You to mount the defense,
who has taken a smack to her now-bloodied cheek
after Zuo has dropped her innocent guard.
This, You has experienced time and time again.
Nevertheless, Liying reemerges, shaken
but intact, with a sympathetic friend
who gives Zheng Da art lessons out of charity,
and, so the audience hopes, is as appealing
to Liying as we hope she is to him.
Liying exposes her vulnerability
by mildly suggesting to her friend – a common
opener in many film romances –
himself as a desirable and desired fix
to the unanswerable troubles she faces.
But firmly he asserts this will not be –
that he’s unavailable for such purposes.
The film ends on a positive note, when Zheng Da,
after a sustained bout of sullenness
brought on by isolation from others his age
and by his mother’s increasing inner turmoil,
begins to show some signs of improvement.
In a flashback sequence we now learn the details.
She’d resisted; the would-be rapist had struck her.
Clawing and scratching, she escaped his grasp,
ran to the kitchen and grabbed a heavy cleaver,
at which, panicking, he threw a wad of cash
at her, begging her neither to kill him
nor to report the incident to the police.
But why wait to share with us this information?
What effect does it have structurally?
It doesn’t seem necessary or warranted,
but somehow it works, and I think this has to do
with Zuo and You. It’s You who takes the blow
to the cheek and Zuo who picks up the meat cleaver –
Zuo arriving late to defend her injured twin,
her craftier and more resourceful twin.
Then it’s out the door, mindless of what’s just happened,
eager to seize her matter of first importance:
her son. And it’s Zuo who puts herself forth
in Liying’s sudden gambit for her handsome friend.
But You knows the friend’s heart is not Liying’s to win,
and this time she’ll let Zuo fall on her face.
Possibly the handsome friend is in agreement.
Possibly, as noble men do in Chinese films,
he’s thinking for her and not for himself.
In any case, it’s only after she’s met the goal
she’s set for herself as a mother and witnessed
improvement in her one and only child
that she reflects on having escaped being raped
or possibly killing a man in self-defense.
Could be that she recalls this only now.
Liying’s full recollection is coextensive
with her satisfaction that all’s well with her son,
that she’s done everything a mother must do.
Zuo and You must be satisfied in each other,
though this doesn’t happen in all of Gong Li’s films.
Not everyone succeeds as does Liying;
one or the other often brings both to ruin.