Frozen is an independently produced Chinese film; it was set in
1994 and it reflects the pessimism the artist community of the post-Tiananmen
Square generation felt about the materialistic Communist regime and how the
regime stifles free expression. It is a call for artistic freedom, but
interestingly enough this political film shies away from offering any
significant political commentary. The director, Wang Xiaoshuai, clashed with the
Chinese authorities over the film, since filmmakers in China must go through
official channels. He finally took the film secretly to Amsterdam to get it
released and took the pseudonym Wu Ming, meaning “No Name.”
There is a coldness about this film that prevents it from being anything
more than an intellectual response to what the students and avant-garde
community in Beijing were feeling at the time.
The story is told in flashback style of a laconic, stoic, depressed
college student, Qi Lei (Jia Hongshen). He is a performance artist who decides
that at the beginning of each of the four seasons he will perform a symbolical
death ritual, which will culminate in his actual suicide. He starts with a mock
self-burial in the autumn, a mock water burial for the winter, a mock burning
for the spring, and for the summer he plans to go through with an actual ice
burial.
It is very difficult to feel anything but regret for his plan of a slow
suicide, a martyrdom for the cause, to show how repressive the communist system
is and how tired he is of living. His plan is to use himself as a concept for
others to rally around his cause. The world has had too many martyrs already and
his plan is such a calculating one, that three-quarters of the film is boringly
spent showing him with his fickle friends and uncaring family.
The film opens at a posthumous exhibition of Qi Lei's art work, where the
attendance is good for the first day but interest in his death soon wanes.
He will be shown again via flashback communicating with the other students
and performance artists, who either do not act favorably to his suicide plan or
remain quiet. A performance artist eats a bar of soap with a knife and fork and
is revolted by what he eats, almost as much as the audience is revolted by
seeing him go through that routine. A fortune teller mysteriously mentions that
he will be reborn, that one life leads to another. His friend, Longhair Guy,
thinks he might be having mental problems and brings him to a mental-health
clinic so he can be dissuaded from committing suicide, but a mistake in identity
occurs and the doctor takes the wrong patient. This was a hard scene to swallow.
It seemed to be a very forced metaphor on the political situation, though it
provided some much needed levity rather than any particular increase in
political insights.
The last 20 minutes of the film offers a surprise twist to the story and
thereby saves it somewhat from the doldrums it was in. It results in a film that
gets its message across that freedom is frozen in China, and that things are
still far from democratic. It was a thought-provoking film, but in a very
manipulative way. It was none too pleasing to view despite its good
intentions.
From www.sover.net
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