Zhao Po (Guo Xiaoran) is a working class kid who starts studying at a
rich kids' college on a special grant. However, he soon realizes he
doesn't totally fit in, and the fact that Yin-Qi (Ge Si-Ran), a girl to
whom he has taken an instant liking, doesn't respond to his advances in
kind doesn't really help too much either. Eventually though, Zhao Po falls
for Gang Xiu (Huo Siyan), a hairsalon girl, and the two of them soon
become a couple. Zhao Po's best friends (Zhao Zhigang, Tang Yinou), day
labourers from his village, don't really approve of Gang Xiu though,
mainly because with him being a college student, they consider her below
him, and furthermore Zhao Po's mum was a hairsalon girl as well who
crossed over into prostitution before her tragic death. When Zhao Po
brings Gan Xiu along on a trip with these friends, they eventually rape
her in an abandoned house and Zhao Po is unable to help her because the
whole thing takes him back to the day his father killed his mother by
throwing her into a river, and then knocked little Zhao Po out via a blow
on the head before he could do anything to help her. After the rape, Gan
Xiu runs away, and all of Zhao Po's attempts to find her are futile. It's
only days later that Gan Xiu shows up again, has sex with Zhao Po and
persuades him to report his friends to the police for the rape. However,
the cops can't follow his route of arguing because Gan Xiu has been found
dead - probably a suicide - a week ago (when all of this has been
happening), and her body shows no signs of rape whatsoever. Zhao Po is
diagnosed as delusional, caused by the blow on his head the father has
administered after he had murdered Zhao Po's mum. Later, Zhao Po's two
friends from his hometown show up and beat him up because he has reported
them for rape, and it's only after that that Zhao Po starts to remember
what has really been going on: When he thought his two friends were raping
Gang Xiu, that was only part of a prank gone wrong, and she was quick to
forgive the guys - but when Zhao Po confronted her with the situation and
got angry, she ran away. He came after her, and by some freak accident,
she fell into a river in the process, and instead of saving her, Zhao Po
had a flashback to his mother's death and sat in arm's reach of drowning
Gang Xiu, traumatized ... An interesting but by no means
perfect movie: It all starts out like one of Eric Rohmer's subtle and
light-footed romances, where nothing much is happening but you feel
compelled to watch nevertheless. Only an early flashback to Zhao Po's
mother's death suggests that there is something wrong here. And this
"something wrong" finally comes to a climax when Zhao Po's
friends rape his girlfriend and she disappears afterwards. Up to here the
film is pretty good, but then it goes downhill: When Zhao Po and Gang Xiu
meet again, it is a tad too apparent that there is something wrong, that
she isn't real and either a ghost or a figment of his imagination, and
when later on her rape is identified as not having been a rape at all,
that somehow derives the story of its dramatic impact, especially since
the alternative explanation seems rather unconvincing. All that said
though, Distant Thunder is by no means a bad movie, it's just too
bad that it falls apart in the end.
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