Rao Hui (played by real-life screenwriter Rao Hui) is a screenwriter
writing for television soaps since his film scripts are almost routinely
rejected by the censors. However, this time he thinks he's onto something,
a road movie about a man on the run, Lin Hao (Yang Zijian), who has
accidently killed his girlfriend durin a fight back in the South, and now
he makes his escape by train from city to city, at one time sharing a
motelroom with a travelling salesman whom he doesn't even like, yet he
spends almost all of his time with him since he's got so much time to
kill. Later, he meets Mimi (Guo Xiaolu), a girl from Beijing, with whom he
starts a relationship though the two don't love each other - but then Mimi
is arrested for prostitution and he can only narrowly escape an arrest
himself. Finally, he decides to go to Mohe, the Northernmost town of
China, right at the Siberian border, a mythical place for most Chinese, a
sort-of Garden Eden where you allegedly can se the Northern lights.
Now Rao Hui has come to a dead end, like most Chinese he only knows
Mohe from textbooks in school, and what's more, Rao Hui hasn't even been
out of Beijing for about five years. However, now he decides to go to Mohe
himself to do some research ... and he finds it to be not the Garden Eden
he had imagined but rather a desolate place in a bleak eternally white
landscape that totally lacks the romantic undercurrent he was looking for.
Yet in this unattractive snow desert, Rao Hui gets in tough with his own
feelings for the first time in years ...
This film could have been a boring desaster with artfilm
(however appropriately) written all over it - yet it quite simply isn't.
Applying an unconventional mix of genre cinema and documentary told in an
unconventional cinematic style concerning camera setups, camera movements
(including a good deal of static camera) and editing, and telling her
story on two levels, director Guo Xiaolu ads just the right touch of irony
to the mix to make the whole film thoroughly entertaining. True, it's not
a loud film and it's ratehr slow-moving - as opposed to the Harrison
Ford-starrer The Fugitive which Rao Hui once claims to be his
blueprint in the film -, but in its own way, it's also fascinating.
Recommended.
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