Two from China(s): The Unseen Sister and Cesium Fallout

I caught these two as a preview double feature Thursday night because I'd looked at the week and seen chaos and it looked like, for most of the week, AMC was not going to let you knock both of them out in the same night. Although, amusingly, doing so on Thursday pointed made it clear that a lot of the two floorplans are basically identical; screen 7 is directly above screen 1 and is arranged the same way, so that I had basically the same seat for both shows, just with 20 feet of vertical distance.

Mildly surprised to see more people in the theater for Cesium Fallout - it's a pretty long movie to start at 9:30pm, or maybe I'm just old! - and the generally pretty scornful reviews online for The Unseen Sister, which I liked. It's enough to make me wonder if One Child Per Family is still enough of a controversial topic that folks simply do not want to engage with it (or be seen engaging with it), and certainly don't want a Taiwanese filmmaker examining the idea.

Or it could just be different taste that's totally apolitical; like Juror #2 earlier in the week, The Unseen Sister has the plot of a thriller but doesn't exactly execute it that way, and a lot of audiences have rebelled at expecting genre and getting art-house (ironically, Warner's shenanigans with Juror #2 might have wound up limiting it to the audience that would go for what he was doing and the movie might be scorned once it breaks containment).

At any rate, I liked The Unseen Sister more, but Cesium Fallout is more likely to hang around even as the big releases start rolling out; plan your trip to the Garden accordingly!


Qiao yan de xin shi (The Unseen Sister)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #1 (new release, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming (check here later)

It's funny that for how much I was kind of fascinated by China's one-child policy about five years back (I've got to repost the entire day of IFFBoston reviews that included One Child Nation sometime), it took me a while to realize that's what was driving this movie, and I wonder how that affected my perception before it clicked. I'm sure that there was a bit less mystery to Chinese audiences, and maybe that being less of a puzzle to unlock made it less exciting in its native land.

It opens with actress Qiao Yan (Zhao Liying) in a screening room, watching her performance in the film she's just shot, saying she wants fewer close-ups of her face, which agent Shen Haomng (Huang Juo) says he will relay to the director. Their contract is almost up, and Qiao Yan isn't eager to renew, or sign endorsement deals; maybe it has something to do with the texts she's been getting saying "I know your secret". Meanwhile, in Myanmar, another woman named Qiao Yan (Xin Zhilei), a year or two older but with more wear on her face and seven months pregnant, is being leaned on by the creditors of her missing husband Yu Liang (Dong Baoshi) - a jade mine hasn't panned out - and she heads to Beijing to find him. The first meets the second at the train station, but furtively beyond even what you might expect for a movie star. They're family that hasn't seen each other in 17 years. As the older Qiao Yan searches for her husband, the younger starts work on a new movie where she plays a pregnant woman weighing an abortion.

If you're seeing a lot of reflections and parallels there, well, that's not the half of it; director Midi Z and his co-writers are working the ideas of art imitating life and similar situations recurring hard, with what might have been hanging over everything. On top of that, he's taking a few shots at the way filmmaking presents a sort of altered reality, as Qiao Yan points out that there's an obvious bit of dishonesty in how the director is distorting his family history for the script, and when the older Qiao Yan tells the younger that she looks skinny and haggard, the actress replies that this is how you look pretty on film. Surprisingly, Midi Z seems somewhat loath to indicate characters' parallel nature visually very often; mirrored compositions and match shots are rare, almost like he doesn't want to be accused of making things too obvious.

Even taking that into account, it's a pretty spiffy little machine of a movie, impressively chilly without quite being completely detached. Many scenes feature snow coming down in a way that is both pretty and ominous, and Midi Z will find and create an interesting shot where it might not be expected fairly often. He builds up the way Shen and others demand a lot of control over their partner as both an actress and a woman, and doesn't exactly hold back in terms of how she has always been determined to choose her own course. One maybe doesn't initially know how, but as the pieces come together it's an interesting question as to whether she's reaching limits or they don't know what they're in for.

It's mostly built on a nice performance by Zhao Liying that gets better as the film goes on and she clearly feels this tightening around her - her Qiao Yan sharp and chilly in a way that is frequently distancing, but there is a point to her icy blankness that complements the various men who treat her like their empty vessel, but also a solidity to her that keeps her from being swallowed by madness as her roles approximate the secret parts of her life. Xin Zhilei has what's often a more traditional role - a woman whose pushiness probably hides a separate agenda - and does well with it; it's quite clear that she's a decade or two into a major choice made when she was very young and still trying to defend it and assure herself that it was the right one. Huang Juo captures something impressively nasty in Shen, too - a fear of how things will fall apart if Qiao Yan really does what she says that manifests as being extra nasty when he thinks he can and ingratiation hasn't been working anyway.

It can all be a little much - you trade a few nice images for accepting the coincidences at times, and I can see opinions on the film opinions reversing depending on whether a flashback seems to conveniently add too much humanity right when the film is going to need it. The last act drags at times. It's the second movie I've seen this week where the thriller setup doesn't quite get one near the edge of one's seat, but I do find myself impressed with the way it plays with film and law both creating phantoms out of real people, and wonder if it might grow in stature.


Fan Sing (Cesium Fallout)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #7 (new release, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming (check here later); soundtrack available on Amazon

This played Hong Kong and China in 3D, right? The first half in particular has the filmmakers really appearing to enjoy throwing stuff at the audience and using angles and depth in a way that really seems like it would be great in that format, and I'm sad that they don't seem to do 3D discs very much in Hong Kong any more because I'd import this even if the movie isn't that great.

Back in 1996, just before the handover, Dr. Simon Fan (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) was a minister in the Hong Kong government who announced a loosening of inspection requirements, with the aim of moving more containers through the Port of Hong Kong - which would soon have tragic consequences as his firefighter wife fell during a harbor conflagration, her brother Kit Li (Bai Yu) losing his grip on her wrist as she fell into the flames. Eleven years later, Simon is a private citizen and respected expert on contaminants, and Kit is still fighting fires, and they are about to be confronted with a monster at a recycling yard that is actually a front for Western hazardous waste disposal: Kit on the ground and Simon as the independent expert consultant to the Hong Kong government, with old rival Cecilia Fong (Karen Mok Man-Wai) acting chief executive. Simon's inspection suggests that radioactive cesium-137 has spilled within the facility, and an incoming super-typhoon could spread it across the entire region.

It's a big, dangerous premise all the more scarier for how common we know this problem to be is of that "the first half in particular" thing; stuff is going horrifically wrong, the firefighters are doing their best to respond, and each new escalation at the burning recycling center looks cool even as it's also obviously terrible. Eventually, though, it gets to a point of slowing down and facing the disaster movie problem where not destroying a global metropolis is not nearly as eye-popping as blowing up Hong Kong. It tries to have it both ways with a couple "here's what could have happened" shots, but even when they're putting an actual clock on the screen, the big climax is never the thrilling race against time and barely escaping the destruction they have to cause to stave off more, and the action is interspersed with way too much negotiating with craven corporate goons and worrying about nondisclosure agreements.

Also, I found myself mildly disappointed that Andy Lau was not the villain, as his being the guy to approve the less-stringent procedures seemed to be suggesting, or even the Chris Evans-in-Sunshine guy we can really dislike even when he's right. it's what he's suited for these days - own your wrinkles and sneer! - but instead, he plays Simon as pushy but not to an extent that there's a real hook. He's really the best chance for the movie to have some colorful characters as opposed to the well-meaning but unprepared folks high up in the government and the vast sea of loose-but-professional folks in the fire trucks. It's not really too many folks to keep track of, but there's not much material to go around - there are two separate romances going on in this firehouse, which just feels like redundancy.

Director Anthony Pun is also the cinematographer, and he and his crew do turn in a pretty good-looking movie, seemingly using planning for 3D as a reminder to make good use of space. They get some nifty compositions out of the massive junkyard, right up until the end when the fires are burning out and it looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland at night. As might be expected from someone who came up shooting rather than writing, he's pretty great at capturing people doing things, less so them talking about things, and it's odd that there's so much of the latter interrupting the former toward the end.

It's a fun movie to watch, but eventually it drags out a bit to reach "epic disaster movie" scale and is stronger at the start than finish.