Winter Vacation (2010)

 

Director: Hongqi Li

Screenplay: Hongqi Li

Cast: Jinfeng Bai, Lei Bao, Hui Wang, Ying Xie, Naqi Zhang

Ephemeral Waves

Sorry comrade, we're illiterate.

Introducing us to the setting, a northern Chinese industrial town, three male teenagers meet up in the middle of the cold winter streets, debating whether to go to the vegetable stand to see a female grocer outside selling cabbages, all because they were informed she was pretty. One of them points out that the only reason this has been raised is only as she is an outsider to the small industrial town, all deciding against this. In the background, a mantra is being repeated from an unknown source whilst they wander off the school. Thus begins a film with the driest of dry humour begins from filmmaker Li Hongqi, which does not set up a comedy of the usual sort but is so deadpan it hits the bottom of a still metaphorical lake of its own creation.

Winner of the Golden Leopard at the 2010 Locano Film Festival, sadly Winter Vacation has become an obscure title, belaying that for its slow still scenes usually shot in establishing shots with the cast, this is the bleakest of comedies. Set in a town in Inner Mongolia to be precise, during Spring Festival, even the cabbages on the vegetable market look bleak in the eyes of poet/novelist/filmmaker Hongqi, also working as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym and stretching scenes to an extreme, all to the point they could cause anxiety for a viewer if they do not find it funny, or frustrates. More so as Hongqi deliberately strips all the character out of the environment, where the only thing left is rundown industrial environments and white walled rooms and the prolonged takes. The only distinctions are really some of the clothing, mostly the teenagers' as between purple and lack striped Bonad Fashion Jeans hoodie and a couple of other items, the adults wear nothing particularly to stand out either. Even the music, baring the Boredoms-esque end credit track, which consists of a hummed female voice contrasted by a male one, hesitates and is seemingly confused, asking in wordlessness with wariness to the male one. If you are not patient with this, Winter Vacation becomes a nightmare but, if used to this tone or prepared, you can be in my shoes where it made the film funnier the longer the scenes lasted.

Even in mind of the humour being mean and misanthropic - with many people slapping each other, the youngest son (a toddler) being constantly threatened with his uncle "kicking his butt", and a female toddler already having lived a long life already with insomnia to go with it during nap times - the humour prevents this film being too bleak. Instead, the bleakest of humour here is universal in its sense of the doldrums of reality, whilst also being political without being blatant about this. This presents not an idealised world, mainland China seen by itself in grandeur and outside by many with controversy, but instead as a place of individual towns and places where life has to drag on. The location, one I have rarely seen in Chinese cinema at the time I finally saw this film, belies the idealised image and is closer to what Jia Zhangke has filmed in terms of his cinema, belying and defying genre too as he went on, in showing the real grounded reality of his country. Within this story, one young male child wishes to become an orphan when he grows up, and another couple formally go for a divorce without any drama to it in a blank looking government office. In among this the teenagers, in-between school, drift around. Some bully others for money by just slapping them repeatedly. One girl shows affection for one boy by making him a green knitted woollen hat, which beyond the prolonged digression of a group looking over it returns back with an unfortunate punch line. Even a "your mother" joke appears, even if significantly less cruder than done in the West.

Another considers that teenage love may affect her studies - probably leading to the best if crudest dialogue among the likes of "I've basically become her menstrual pad" or the entire life goal of wanting to continue on an endless cycle of fruit from someone's loins, when the boy saying this is too young and clearly naive to know what an adult relationship will be like - and another considers a way to help his country, taking the mantel of wanting to be a good comrade but considering school a useless direction instead of alternatives. You could argue it goes for the obvious - in which the finale involves a male teacher (having forgotten to take his medicine) giving an improvised lecture to a class about the pointlessness of human progression, instead of the intended one on apomictic molluscs, only to be informed he is in the wrong classroom - but Winter Vacation became too glacially witty to be pointlessly nihilistic.

A joy is to be had in how dour the film is in the right mindset, and profoundness is to be found for a grandfather watching on TV scenes, from one of the director's own films, of the same stillness only to have both someone slapping another person, and then a scene of two people with walking sticks on a street antagonising each other. When the film is willing even to be crude, it does stand out against the rigid filmmaking style. Anything that is remotely political in the obvious sense, jokes on couches and chairs set out in the snow about wanting to do much for the country between teenagers, is there to deflate the image of mainland China with probably as much power than anything overtly critical in another filmmaker's work. Personally, Winter Vacation even without the decade of build to see, as I first heard of the film in fleeting coverage of the 2010 Locarno Film Festival in Sight & Sound magazine, was a thing to delight in with my own perverse joy.