BREAKING THE SILENCE (Sun Zhou, 2000)

Once widely considered the world’s most beautiful woman, Gong Li gives the performance of a lifetime in her favorite role of Sun Liying, a divorced mother in Beijing struggling to ready her son for school, in Sun Zhou’s warm, deeply affecting Piao liang ma ma—literally, Pretty Mama. Ten-year-old Zheng Da, because deaf, is speech-impaired, and matters go from very bad to worse when his hearing aid becomes a casualty of a fight with taunting schoolboys. How is his mother going to earn the 5,000 yuan needed to replace the hearing aid? She cleans houses (which requires warding off a would-be rapist), delivers newspapers, takes a turn at being an illegal bookseller; she does, or attempts to do, whatever it takes.
     Sun’s superlative film, which took the Hundred Flowers Award as the year’s best and the best Asian film prize at Hawaii, moves at a breakneck pace attuned to urban intensity and to Sun Liying’s overflowing responsibilities before it segues seamlessly, that is, without stylistic or tonal tearing, to a much slower, more compelling pace as Sun Liying gradually heads to the moment when she discards a burdensome martyr-complex and embraces the revelatory fact that her son is the braver of the two of them. Gong charts an amazing, at times agonizing, trajectory of both ordeal and character development. The subtlety, naturalness and quiet, often silent power of Gong’s brilliant acting justify her plethora of best actress prizes: at Montréal, from the Shanghai film critics, the Golden Rooster (the Chinese film industry prize, comparable to the U.S. Oscar), the Golden Phoenix and Hundred Flowers Awards.
     However, everyone contributes a sterling performance, including Gao Xin, the actually deaf youngster who plays Zheng Da, and Shi Jing-ming, who plays a teacher sympathetic to mother and son.

THE DEPOT OF THE DEAD (Czesław Petelski, 1959)

“We both know it’s a forlorn land, awful roads [in the mountains], and bandits . . . People have no timber for building, [for use] in mines, or even to heat their homes. . . . You must go.”

A group of men living on the edge: truckers transporting timber across treacherous territory in the snow in southeastern Poland. From Marek Hłasko’s story “Następny do raju” (“Next Stop Paradise”), adapted by Hłasko and the director, Czesław Petelski, Baza ludzi umarłych is a turbulent drama that variously recalls other black-and-white films: Lev Kuleshov’s By the Law (1926), Henri-Georges Clozuot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955).
     Much of the action takes place in and around a way-cabin, in whose cramped quarters the men stop, joined by a timber company agent and his wife. The agent disables the men’s trucks, temporarily holding them prisoner, perhaps hoping that the delay in shipment will drive up the cost. Regardless, the event underscores the degree to which the company “owns” the men and comandeers their destinies.
     Visually the film is rough, with hair-cropping closeups, uncoordinated activity, dispensed blows. When one man tells another to get his ass out of his—the speaker’s—face, the “ass” really is in there; the one being addressed is bent over, shaving. Indeed, considerable “conversation” is coarse, suited to the film’s appearance; Andrzej Wajda’s aestheticizing touch in Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is missing here, although Petelski’s film provides another view of the dark night of the Polish soul.
     Helping conjure an allegorical atmosphere are the characters’ generalizing nicknames, for instance, Partisan, Warsawer, Apostle. This last, a drunk, cannot recall the Bible when he attempts to quote from it; eventually he is crushed—quasi-crucified—by rolling timber. “Does God see me?” Apostle asks, dying.
     Unresolved film.