ZU FENG IN A LONG SHOT

GAO PENG: A LONG SHOT (2023) 2024 NYAFF

Impressive debut about China in chaos on the brink

The early scenes of this film, which are dark, desperate, and violent, grabbed me immediately. However "grimy" or gritty, rain-drenched and in multiple shades of grey it is, Gao Peng's directorial debut is a wonderful film, transferring the searching moral intensity of Krzysztof Kieślowski with the action showdown of a great Western to a period Chinese setting and with an intense human drama at the center of it all. Based on a real event, A Long Shot focuses on northeastern China and the huge, festering Fenglin Ferroalloy Factory, an old iron and steel foundry which isn't functioning productively and hasn't paid its 8,000 employees for months. It's the winter of 1990, before the economic miracle, when the changeovers of the economy were struggling to happen. Violence and disorder prevail and there are frequent thefts, culminating in a shootout toward the film's end. Amid the schemes and robberies and violence what's happening is a human struggle to live one's life.

A Long Shot is brilliant enough to have gotten complimentary festival reviews in Hollywood Reporter (Jordan Mintzer) and Screen Daily (Wendy Ide). Mintzer is basically right in his concluding assessment that what's "ultimately most memorable" here isn't the finale "gunplay" but the film's overall "setting itself," which has the air of "a small city" that's become the victim of "a major dystopian catastrophe." The gunplay, the action, is good too, and so are the intense human bonding and coming of age stories and the portrait of a struggling society. There are a lot of characters, a lot going on, wrangled by the three writers plus the director who penned the screenplay. Apart from the workers, who figure, as well as their disaffected, aimless or delinquent young offspring, there are the managers, who tilt into criminality in the desperate situation too, and a rough gang of security guards who function as local police, when they're doing what they're supposed to, settling trouble often violently, often without turning it over to the police.

Though the opening depicts violence among youths and the security crew's aggressive handling of it, and these youths will flow in and out of the scene, riskily stealing parts and scrap from the factory's interior, playfully throwing firecrackers at each other and on the windshield of the factory manager's car, in the foreground of the film is its struggling moral center, the former champion sharpshooter Gu Xuebing (Zu Feng), who once was a local celebrity, but became deaf in one ear and had to quit. Now he is one of the security guards, but unlike the others, he refuses to take bribes from thieves. There is also his female friend Jin Yu Jia (Qin Hailu), whom Wendy Ide assumes is his former lover; she thinks her son Xiao Jun (Zhou Zhengjie) is also his. Jin Yu Jia urges him to mentor the boy, who gets caught in a robbery of the factory in the opening sequence, though boy and man have a love-hate relationship. Zhou Zhengjie's intense expectant gaze and Zu Feng's world-weary gloom are the contrasting emotional and visual hearts of the film. When Zhou discovers the sleazy bar his mother has been forced to moonlight at, it's a classic scene of disillusionment. Everyone struggles with each other - and with the pushes and pulls of the environment, with its social volatility and economic stress.

The action thriller finale is as clear and compelling, transported to this chaotic setting, as a John Ford Western. It comes at a time of an ill-starred 40th factory anniversary celebration when the 8,000 employees are going to finally get some back salary payoffs. The sound of firecrackers mingles with machine gun fire. Gu Xuebing and Xiao Jun both put their hands on a certain illicit homemade weapon - changes in arms access regulations are another theme underlined in opening and closing onscreen texts. But when the smoke clears and the film's over one has lots more to ponder than that, guided by the youth Xiao Jun's intensity and moral confusion and Gu Xuebing's courage and sense of loss. This film is a thrilling picture of a country full of energy, a "smoldering crucible" just on the brink of betterment. It may also refer (as Mintzer notes) to the country's "current economic slump," or to all the twisting and breaking of law that's always gone on.

A Long Shot老枪 ("Old Gun," also "Old Timer"), 117 mins., debuted at Tokyo (Best Artistic Contribution winner: see coverage of the Tokyo Q&A); it was also presented at Mykolaichuk (Ukraine) Jun. 16, 2924. Screened for this review as part of the2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 19, 9:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Intro and Q&A with director Gao Peng


TEEN REBELS INA LONG SHOT

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.