Review
DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP
Written and directed by Wen Jiang
Home Vision Entertainment, 2000
Banned for all the wrong reasons in China – a nude scene, an ambivalent attitude to the Kuomintang (the Communists’ arch-rivals in the liberation struggle) and the free use of the term "turtle-fucker," (the locals’ favourite term of abuse) – Devils on the Doorstep is a rare thing in contemporary cinema. Not only is it a piece of low-budget epic entertainment, but it’s also an art film of the first order, cleverly constructed from a minimum of resources, and an emotional roller-coaster that never stoops to cheap sensationalism.
In 1945, during the final months of the Japanese occupation of China, in a remote seaside village, a Chinese peasant is pulled out of bed to take forced custody of two Japanese hostages, with instructions to keep them alive until the guerrillas’ return in a few weeks. The weeks pass and the guerrillas do not return. As the whole village is gradually drawn into the problem of deciding the hostages’ fate, the situation spirals out of control, culminating in what the Japanese history books like to call "an unfortunate incident."
The bulk of the film consists of interior close-up shots, scenes set in the hostages’ cell, where their captors and custodians take turns confronting them and arguing among themselves. In these scenes, the tightness of the shots emphasizes the trapped claustrophobia of the situation, steadily knitting the various characters’ fates together. A great ensemble cast of villagers, led by the director himself, make the most of the film’s unusual length (over two and a half hours), turning each of their half-dozen roles into fully developed characters. The occasional exterior shots come as such a release from this pressure that one hardly notices the scarcity of extras in the village.
All this is what makes the film work so well as a comedy thriller, but the soul of a film, like that of a man, lies beyond the necessary – in the free space left when the purely functional has been attended to. So, it’s in the final 15 minutes, when the drama has worked itself through to its illogical conclusion, that Devils on the Doorstep really takes off, raging mercilessly against the stupidity of force and its brutally clumsy attempts at justice.
If the film has a weakness, it’s in the somewhat stereotyped presentation of the Japanese characters, which goes a bit beyond the needs of slapstick, but they’re in no position to complain.
The DVD comes with a warm tribute from Steven Soderbergh, by way of introduction, which is nice, although I suspect most North American viewers would have benefited more from a quick historical background piece. |
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