There are several surprising aspects in Bound in Heaven (Kun bang shang tian tang. Huo Xin, 2024), a film included in the official competition of the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival. The most striking? It is the first feature as director of the Chinese filmmaker Huo Xin (1980-), who has enjoyed a long career as a screenwriter for television and film productions of a playful and commercial nature; among them, Shower (Zhang Yang, 1999) and the popular Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004). However, Huo has chosen to begin her path as director with an intense and dark story adapted by Pan Yu from the 2003 novel Bundled Up to Heaven, written by Li Xiuwen.
The movie protagonists are a woman and a man who want to be free, each in their own way, and who take that aspiration to its ultimate consequences, also a rarity in today’s cinema addicted to moral relativism. The actress, singer and model Ni Ni, who debuted in The Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou, 2011), plays Xia You, a young executive subjected by her husband to physical and psychological abuse, afraid to flee from him because he has helped her acquire a certain social and economic status. Zhou Yu, a prolific actor in Chinese television and streaming productions, plays Xu Zitai, an outcast who works in all kinds of odd jobs, so he has nobody to report back to, a social isolation that also extends to other aspects of his life. A concert by the famous pop singer Faye Wong unites their destinies by chance, and they feel immediately an irresistible mutual attraction. After a couple of fleeting encounters over the years, they become inseparable.
At first, Bound in Heaven seems to be a melodrama, with the problematic addition of serious topics such as domestic abuse and toxic masculinity. Yet, the movie eschews easy topicality by gradually transforming into a story of two people who try to understand each other, despite coming from very different social backgrounds. Ultimately, it becomes a harsh neo-noir focused on illness, sacrifice and unrelenting decisions about life and death, the obvious theme of this San Sebastián Festival edition, that reaches notable levels of rawness —or as Xu says, “Dying is easy, living is complicated.”
The balance achieved between all the different genres is Huo Xin’s most relevant merit. It is not difficult to recognize influences, from the Nouvelle Vague —and, specifically, from the hyper-stylized Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)— as well as similarities to the sensibility of contemporary directors such as the South Korean Lee Chang-dong, or another Chinese director, Gan Bi. But Huo proves to have her own personality, backed by meticulous cinematography and editing work. Bound in Heaven is a feast for the eyes, a movie of sumptuous plastic beauty even in its harshest moments, with a frame composition that’s extremely precise, combined with a great sense of narrative flow.
Xin’s rigorous style effectively ensures that the genres combined in the film are at the service of a plausible development of the protagonists’ psychology. Furthermore, Xia You and Xu Zitai’s journey into the depths of themselves ensures that Bound in Heaven comes across as a hypnotic, beautiful succession of rural and urban landscapes. Huo also establishes a dialogue between those different landscapes pointing to very interesting questions about today’s China and the expectations of its younger generations. If we add to all this a design of music and sound effects that powerfully convey a feeling of deep sensitivity, even in the most mundane scenes, we can only celebrate Bound in Heaven as one of the finest directorial debuts in recent times.
Diego Salgado
Edited by Ela Bittencourt
© FIPRESCI 2024