Red Amnesia (Wang Xiaoshuai)

 Red Amnesia is a bold Chinese thriller cross genre cinema by Wang Xiaoshuai. It is a tale of paranoia, regret, past misdeeds, and retribution. Wang Xiaoshuai is mainly known to the Western audiences for the 2001 Silver Bear winning movie, Beijing Bicycles. Wang considers Red Amnesia to be the last film of his Cultural Revolution trilogy, which includes 2005’s ‘Shanghai Dreams’ and 2011’s ’11 Flowers’   

An award-worthy performance by stage vet Lu Zhong fuses together the elements of “Red Amnesia.”

Red Amnesia begins as a mystery thriller. Deng (Lu Zhong), an old woman whose husband passed away recently, lives alone in Beijing. She wants to be useful to her family. Deng often intrudes on the personal lives of her two sons, whose family life is abruptly disturbed by a series of anonymous phone calls and episodes of stalking. Her older son Jun (Feng Yuanzheng) and wife Lu (Amanda Qin) live with their little boy in a modern, handsomely furnished apartment, and have embraced international consumerist culture. Younger son Bing (Qin Hao) has a salon. 

Each day she enters her sons’ homes to cook, or take charge of her grandson. This annoys her daughter-in-law. She intrudes in Bing’s life, scolding him for the way he lives. Bing retreats behind his cell phone, further pushing his mother out. After a lifetime of knowing her role, and adapting to quixotic changes imposed by the Communists, she’s now disoriented. . Deng herself isn’t immune to these new family alignments: Her elderly mother is in a nursing home.  The fact that Deng hasn’t taken her into her own home is itself a significant shift in filial responsibility.

The film’s trajectory is broken during the middle part of the film. It wanders between reality and dream before collapsing into a political.

Wang’s usual subtle evocation of family dynamics is at its very best in the way he reveals the relationships between recently widowed Deng Meijuan (Lu) and her offspring.

By this point viewers know the perpetrator is a mysterious teen (Shi Liu) who has been stalking Mrs. Deng for days. Mrs. Deng’s agitation grows, and with it returns feelings of guilt. She and her family were relocated to the mountainous southern province during the Cultural Revolution. When policies eased and it was possible for limited numbers of people to move away from the hardships of the factory, she stole the Beijing transfer spot allocated to the Zhao family, who were fated to remain in Guizhou.

In reality, this is a mix of two movies. One is observational, reflecting on how rapid changes in China’s social fabric affected an entire generation.

The other movie here is designed as a mystery revealing the long-lasting damage caused by moral compromise. The film’s implicit criticism lies not with the perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution, whose twisted mass experiment ended in so much death and long-lasting misery.

Anchoring it all is Lu Zhong’s fully realized performance. Bossy, lonely and haunted in multiple ways, her ‘Mrs. Deng’ is also a confused woman whose understanding of the ways to express love cannot adjust to the new dynamics.

Red Amnesia is an attempt to innovate. The director has attempted to meld art cinema with genre film-making.