REVIEW - A TOUCH OF SIN

Jia Zhang Ke has apparently had enough. He's finished with presenting his assessments on the state of contemporary China through its impacts on its citizens in a measured fashion. We witness the casual, almost lazy way in which he depicts the murder of three would-be robbers in the film's first scene, and see that very little has actually changed in Jia's cinematic world. It is only the addition of sudden, callous, visceral violence, exacted not with sadism but with swiftness, the violent effects being not in the act but in the aftermath (each time cruelly bypassed, as though none of it ever even occurred), and all of it fraught with intent and purpose. Jia's film is, structurally, divided into four mostly-separate stories, but it is the subdivisions which register stronger - each act of brutality concluding its own chapter, Jia examining the causes of these sins and then moving on to the next. The final scene encourages you to meditate on the content of the film as a whole argument, comprised of several similar, supporting arguments - if this is the artistic thread required to bind these together, and the allegorical thread required to make Jia's point as bitterly clear as possible, it's also a redundant intellectual thread, since this superficially basic exercise in barbarity foregrounds its subtext, and the transparency with which this is done makes obvious the fact that A Touch of Sin is pure allegory, through and through. The farcical first quarter of the film is the most dramatically engaging, while the third, starring Jia's wife Zhao Tao, builds insidiously to a satisfying sting. Cross-references between the four stories, some subtle, many not, make up for the lack of traditional narrative continuity. And that is much the point of A Touch of Sin - for Jia, and for us, it represents a violent, and perhaps ineffectual, separation from the inhumanity in tradition, and a hollow, sour celebration of the individual.