Rarely is Albert Camus’s words invoked in film with as much intention as in Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, in cinemas across the UK from 16 August.
★★★★☆ 4/5
Director: Shujun Wei
Starring: Yilong Zhu, Tong Lin Kai, Chloe Maayan, Tianlai Hou
Release Date: 16 Aug 2024
Certificate :15
Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment
Throughout the duration of the film, what was once a theatre is being repurposed by the local police force as the new headquarters. The venue feels haunted by the ghost of cinema. Bureaucracy festers on the carcass of the arts.
Camus’s ideas in ‘The Rebel’ seem to have made a deep impression on Shujun. The police chief that the film clings on to, Ma Zhe, starts of as the ideal rebel that Camus delineates.
It may seem paradoxical to consider Zhe as a rebel considering his stoic acquiescence, but it is important to distinguish what it means to “rebel” as opposed to “revolt”. Camus posits that revolution is presented as a solution to the false problem of the “end of the world”. To rebel, however is a compelling force for those disillusioned by contemporary justice. This force can be formulated as the tension between the human desire for logical clarity in the backdrop of a world that is devoid of reason.
Camus’s writing is laced with a thread of pessimism, one similarly woven into Only the River Flows.The film itself is based on Yu Hua’s short novel “Mistakes by the river”. Director Shujun cowrote the script with Kang Chunglei and has recontextualised Camus’s observations to the setting of China in the 90s.
This synthesis is done to great effect and is most potent in the storyline of Ma Zhe wanting to get an abortion after both him and his wife are informed that their child carries a risk of stunted development as a result of a genetic mutation. Zhe‘s resistance to having the child is induced by the One Child Policy in effect at the time. This pressure is heightened by his occupation as an enforcing agent. There is an inherent contradiction in his altruistic intentions and pragmatic approach.
It is only until the final sequence of the film is the outcome to the couples decision presented. In the time it took to make that decision, the only way to describe the unfolding series of events is absurd. A moment in which cop and killer, rebellion and conspiracy, past and future, are superimposed to project a film on screen.
The final few shots feel otherworldly. Otherworldly in the sense that the viewer feels convinced that this is either a dream or the afterlife. Even with the title-cards explicitly denoting reality by marking events with time (“1 year later”), it does not feel real. Some would support a transcendental view of Ma Zhe’s life, whilst others may argue it is one without morals and consequence.
“I rebel therefore we exist” (Camus)
Nothing exists at the end.
