NY ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Aug. 6-22. 6, 2021

[Chris Knipp]

CAO JINLING: ANIMA 莫爾道嘎(2020)

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QI XI IN ANIMA

Inner Mongolian drama set in an eighties lumber camp

Set in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s, when China launched economic development programs that resulted in widespread clear-cutting of old growth forest, this is a passionate but overbearing and unduly gloomy debut that combines fraught love conflict with a message about threatened ethnic minorities and planetary degradation. Anima focuses on two Evenki tribe brothers and their rivalry over a pretty and very resourceful "wild woman" widow; but it is really about the death of their traditional way of life, and of our planet. I respect the central notion that we are all part of one soul (the "anima" of the title), but the film would work better if it let the larger environmental topic take care of itself. Unfolding in mostly frigid, austere locales, with cinematography by Hou Hsaio Hsien regular Mark Lee Ping-bing, writer-director Cao Jinling’s film plunges us into the rough world of a community that has been drawn into the destruction of its own native environment to survive.

It all starts with breathless whispered narration à la Terrence Malick by the protagonist, Linzi, extolling the seasons, followed by the story of how On a cold winter day in the town of Muirdauga (Mo Er Dao Ga),* as a small boy he fell into a bear den during a hunting trip and his older brother TuTu is forced to kill the bear, which is considered taboo and labels him an outcast in the Evenki tribe. Their mother dies in this exploit. As adults the brothers, who have been exiled with their father to a small twon on the edige of the forest, work in a lumber camp run by Boss Yan, who heads the biggest of the Han lumber triads that are moving into tribal territory. At the camp, Linzi is forever pouty and unwilling while Tutu is crudely enthusiastic about anything to make a buck.

One day comes the big plot twist: Linzi (Eric Wang) is strolling in an old growth forest that is his secret when he is caught in a wolf trap set by Chun (Qi Xi), the widow who will become his wife. She winds up coming to the logging camp and being the replacement cook for a while, leading to Tutu's becoming enamored of her, but Linzi is the one who fell into her trap, so she chooses him.

The action is sometimes charming and funny, the setting authentic, but unlike other reviewers, among whom Wally Adams of Eastern Kicks seemed the most helpful (I am indebted to him for my understanding of the background of the story), why do I find the film deeply unsatisfying? Simply because it seems so manipulative from the very beginning, with its contrasting brothers, its pointed early trauma, and all the rest, and then a finale in which nature has its way. Director Cao Jinling gets our attention; I'll grant him that. And his recreation of a macho Chinese lumber camp is interesting. But the writing is heavy-handed.

Adams calls Anima "probably China's finest 'minority' film at least since 2015’s Paths of the Soul" and says that "what that film did for Tibetan land, culture and beliefs, Anima does for a people and place considerably less explored in the Western consciousness." So be it, but I was reminded for some reason of Zacharias Kunuk's 2001 extraordinary film of an ancient Inuit legend, Atanarjuat. That may be unfair. But there's a "minority film."

Anima 莫爾道嘎(Mordaoga), 120 mins., in China Evenki and Mandarin, debuted at Cairo, where Qi Xi was nominated for the best actress award, and showed at many other international festivals including Hong Kong, Moscow, Singapore, Shanghai, Udine, Fribourg, and the NYAFF.

*Adams explains "Mo Er Dao Ga" (the film's original title) and the now protected Moerdaoga national forest to which it now refers, and the trajectory of Inner Mongolia in his review.