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’
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.
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