New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

WANG YICHUN: THE ESCAPING MAN (2023)

About a boy

Wang Yichun made an outstanding debut with her uncompromisingly dark 2015 small-town procedural, What's in the Darkness, which interwove a grim murder mystery with a girls's coming of age story. This time also she weaves a playful, surreal mix of love and crime, featuring the story of a prisoner, Sheng Li (Jiang Wu, NYAFF 2018 Star Asia Award recipient),now released after serving 20 years on trumped-up rape charges, who quickly gets lured into helping his former girlfriend, his putative victim, to kidnap the little boy whom she's been hired to nanny. She wants to get back at the parentsfortheir condescending way they have been treating her. Sheng Li has sought out his accuser and become her collaborator. This leads to a bizarre mixture of the benevolent and the cruel.

This is a story about personalities and social status, abilities and injustice, and also about excessive bourgeois privilege in modern China. As in her first film, Wang is simultaneously focused on several different subjects, another one being the contradictory ways that adults interact with children and how children behave in the world. Maggie Lee described the earlier film as "Like 'Twin Peaks' with Confucian characteristics." This film's festival blurb calls it a "juxtaposition of cynicism and hopeless romanticism." What emerges is that Wang's cinema is a place to go for unexpected combinations. This will be the friendliest kidnapping you'll ever see. It rings new changes on the Stockholm Syndrome, and is unusually forgiving toward some criminal activities and hard on the new bourgeoisie. The level of whimsy becomes extreme, but Wang enters into her own unique world of fantasy.

The Escaping Man 绑架毛乎乎 ("Kidnapping ...."), 101 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF. For What's in the Darkness the 47-year-old director, who studied French before becoming a filmmaker, won the best director award at the 9th FIRST International festival in Xining, China and it was included in the Berlinale Generation section in 2016. This is The Escaping Man's international debut.

SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 26, 9:00pm
SVA Theatre
Intro and Q&A with director Wang Yichun and producer Zhao Wendi