User Reviews

I found this to be Jia's strongest film to date. The four short films that make up this movie are very much related in that they are based on real events, which makes the unfolding scenes seem surreal, but at the same time evoking great pathos for the protagonists.

Going in there are some things to keep in mind. The title and events pay a bit of homage to A Touch of Zen, an older wuxia films, which also featured Buddhism as a key theme. In a Touch of Sin, any kind of faith in anyone just falls apart. There is no love, no happiness, and no success. Dreams are not achieved and even when the protagonists achieve their goals of revenge or justice, they are left bitter and empty.

By using real events Jia is sending out a not so subtle message about how many people in China have lost themselves to greed, have suffered and worked hard to no avail. Living standards do not increase due to corruption, one character has lost his connection with his own family, a mistress begs a man to leave his wife, to be beaten up herself while it is implied that the husband is unscathed, and yet another will do anything to feed her child, including selling her body.

Anyone who has been to China for long periods of time will have seen these events, or something similar, over and over again and it is the ending of the film that drives this message home. You have only yourself to blame repeated while the camera focuses on a group of blank faces, watching and enjoying a show. Jia is talking to all Chinese who just observe, and he seems passionate here to drive the message home, that they are to blame for how their lives have become. And they need to act if they want things to change.

The title of 'A Touch of Sin', Jia Zhangke's latest commentary on crime and corruption in Chinese society today, appears to have a double meaning. First the 'sins' in the title, refer to either the violent actions of the four protagonists Zhangke has culled from the headlines in modern day China today, or the ruling forces that led them to commit such violent acts. The word 'touch', of course is meant to be wholly ironic; as the violent acts themselves are way more than just a 'touch', and the level of violence (as Zhangke suggests) permeates the entire society.

But the title also refers to the 1971 Chinese epic action film, 'A Touch of Zen'. The 'Zen' narrative is written in the style of a Wuxia story, which roughly translates as 'Martial Hero'. Wuxia heroes often came from the lower social classes in ancient China and were bound by a code of chivalry that required them, according to Wikipedia, "to right wrongs, fight for righteousness, remove an oppressor, redress wrongs and bring retribution for past misdeeds."

The first of the four stories in 'A Touch of Sin', focuses on Dahai, a coal mining company employee, who is the former classmate of the corporate boss in a provincial town. Dahai, like a Wuxia hero, seeks to right wrongs and fight for righteousness, but ends up becoming unhinged, after confronting the boss, as he arrives at the local airport in his private jet. Dahai's main complaint is that the boss reneged on his offer of profit sharing to his employees. After suffering a humiliating public beat down by the boss' thugs and an attempt to buy him off after he's hospitalized, Dahai goes on a rampage and murders the boss' underlings as well as the boss himself.

The second and least successful of the stories involves a migrant worker, Zhou San, who dispatches three youths who try to rob him while he rides his motorcycle, at the beginning of the film. Zhou turns up at his mother's 70th birthday party but tells his wife that he can't remain at home. We later find out why: Zhou earns his money by shooting strangers on a crowded street and stealing their handbags.

Perhaps the most developed of the four stories, is the third one. Xiao Yu (Zhangke's wife in real life) is a receptionist at a sauna. Her married lover wants her to move to the town where he works, but she refuses, since he's still married. Xiao gets beaten up upon orders of the man's wife but later faces even more danger. A corrupt government official who we earlier see attempt to shake down a transportation worker on a public highway, attempts to sexually assault Xiao at the sauna. She uses a knife (which she took at the train station from her married lover, after he wasn't allowed to carry it on to the train), and stabs the government official multiple times, preventing him from raping her.

Finally, there's the story of Xiao Hui, a young man, who breaks company rules by chatting with a co-worker while work is going on. The co- worker is injured and Xiao Hui is ordered to work, with all his earnings given to the injured co-worker, for the time he's out on sick leave. Xiao Hui flees to another city where he takes a job as a greeter at a high-end sex club, The Golden Age. He befriends a girl there but their relationship fizzles after he realizes she can't escape her job as a 'comfort woman'. Xiao ends up at the grim 'Oasis of Prosperity', a housing complex for workers who toil endless hours on an assembly line. When the co-worker who was injured earlier tracks Xiao down and demands payment of his money, Xiao ends up jumping off the roof.

As a film, 'A touch of Sin', has a schizoid quality. On one hand, Zhangke's does a commendable job of exposing the ills of contemporary Chinese society. The disparity between rich and poor is illustrated in the first story, where promises of worker compensation are never met. The image of the local population, forced to come out to welcome the corporate boss at the airport, as he arrives on his private jet, sticks in one's memory. In the second story, the heinous nature of crimes committed by cold-blooded criminals who escape the bar of justice, is highlighted in high relief. In the third story, the plight of women who are exploited by sexually abusive men, who occupy positions of power, is revealed. And finally, the dehumanization of people in general, through assembly line work, leads one young man in particular, to take his own life.

Despite exposing the ills of modern day China, Zhangke, perhaps owing to his love for the martial arts action epic, appears to revel in the violence he purportedly so detests. Particularly in the first two episodes (and even in the third), the violence seems to appear on screen, for its own sake. There's a great deal of blood-letting but never any consequences (no one ever seems to react when someone is killed). There's more of a story in the third episode, but even there, the stabbing by the victimized sauna worker, has more of a vengeful than defensive tone.

The performances and the cinematography are persuasive. Nonetheless, the pacing is quite languid and there's a lack of solid character development. Yes, Zhangke has managed to illustrate a number of stories culled from contemporary headlines, detailing the basic facts about each character—but unfortunately, the overall narrative called for more (and certainly with a little less sensationalism). As of this date, it's my understanding that 'A Touch of Sin' has not been shown in China, due to censorship. Hopefully, that situation will change, since the film also offers some correctives for those who maintain an iron grip on millions, who toil, with little hope for economic and political freedom.

While cinema should have elements of universal appeal, to appreciate "A Touch of Sin" it's useful to have some sense of Chinese society and history. Many of the elements in A Touch of Sin would resonate well with a Chinese audience, but I'm afraid most Westerners wouldn't catch them. The very fact that dialogue in each scenario is conducted in a very distinctive (mutually unintelligible) local dialect is totally missed by the English subtitles (indeed, in China, the film would need standard Mandarin subtitles!)-- but the issue of dialect and local origins in a 'wanderer's society" like China would have a huge impact on the Chinese viewing audience.

Other reviewers mention that when violence occurs, bystanders don't seem to have any reaction -- this can be seen as a direct homage to the great Lu Xun (China's foremost modernist writer of the 1920s) who claimed that his very entry into the world of literature was inspired by a photograph of a public execution in China --where gawking bystanders in the background of the photo had no reaction to the violence happening before them. Similarly, the "assassination at the temple" (first story) can be seen as a direct reference to the famous 1935 assassination of the notorious Shanghai warlord Sun Chuanfang as he was praying in a Buddhist temple (an assassination that was seen as totally righteous and virtuous by the Chinese public at the time). And finally -- the very existence of the Chinese Communist Party, and the entire People's Republic of China -- is due to an ideology that the social injustices caused by capitalism must be solved by violence. (Think Dahai's killing spree, but on a mass scale). If you want to know why the film is not shown in China, think no further than this!!

We always analyze Western films within their cultural and historical contexts....to not do so with non-Western films does an injustice to the film and the film-maker.

In Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin four individuals revolt against their oppressive lives in contemporary China. It's one of those films whose backdrop is so rarely seen and fascinating we're tempted to ignore the narrative for it. But the stories are too strong to miss.

In a small northern town a loner in a green coat campaigns against the local politicos who have grown obscenely rich by skimming off the money from their sale of the collectively owned mine. The two main symbols are the Mao statue in the town square, all but ignored now, and the Maserati the boss bought and leaves outside his factory. The hero snaps and guns down everyone in his way to the boss, whom he kills at the Buddhist temple.

The second hero returns home on his motorcycle in a Chicago Bulls cap, to find the region scarred by high rises and the Three Gorges hydroelectric plant. The scenes seem like the usual awkward homecoming, till we learn he's just killed three men.

In the fourth story a young man leaves his factory job when he's expected to give his salary to a co-worker who badly injured his hand in a work accident. The boy works as a waiter in a high-priced brothel, where he's attracted to a young whore who reveals she's working to provide for her little daughter. Seeing no escape from the web of poverty and corruption the lad kills himself.

In the third story a sauna receptionist has broken off with her married lover. When a wealthy man flogs her with his bankroll to bully her into sex she kills him and wanders off bloodied and distracted. She returns in an epilogue, rehabilitated, applying for a job in different part of the country. When she watches a street theatre company the lead peers out at the audience and asks: "Do you know your sin?" But the camera holds on the audience, everyday faces, not the ones whose stories we have stumbled into. The implication is that while we have watched characters driven by ideals and desperation into sin perhaps there is a heavier sin among those prosaic citizens who have quietly put up with everything. If our four heroes have committed "a touch of sin," the collective sins of omission weigh heavier still. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.

Chinese film-maker Jia Zhang-ke's new film 'A Touch of Sin' is made up of four stories loosely connected to each other. <!--more-->Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) introduces us to the first of the four characters, a quiet man who seems to have a lot to hide. As with the other characters, Zhou San works away from home and thus separated from his family and home. Dahai (Jiang Wu) tells another story, a coal miner who won't stop pestering everyone about how his boss sold off the mine and got rich while never distributing the wealth to the village. One too many outbursts leads to a chain of events which ends badly.

The third story sees Hubei (Zhao Tao) working in a massage parlour as a receptionist, who is having an affair with a married man. Having waited so long for him to make up his mind, Hubei gives him 6 months to leave his wife. Troubles with work and her private life soon catch up with Hubei, as it does with the final character Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan). The youngest of the four characters, Xiao Hui drifts from job to job, seemingly in a permanent state of flux. He left his last job through an act of cowardice, involving a work-related accident with a colleague. Permanently broke and unable to find his feet anywhere, Hubei finds the struggle of keeping a job and sending money to his mother difficult to fathom.

'A Touch of Sin' exposes the four individuals struggles in modern China, revealing a growing discontent between the exploited working classes and the ruling elite which forces them to take measures into their own hands. Animals are metaphors for these people who are transported from place to place, who have no apparent control over their location or destiny. These lost souls are defined by a stark landscape of degradation, greed and corruption. There's nowhere to hide, each cannot continue with the life they've led, being controlled by others who gain everything and return very little. Each has to make a decision whether to become part of the system which will benefit themselves but lose all sense of morality and ethics, to avenge their ills, or to curl up and die.

'A Touch of Sin' starts off well, Dahai's story is one which will probably interest you the most. But the film is too long, and suffers from a second half which doesn't quite match the tension and drama of the first half. Its a bleak and unforgiving film, such is the pessimism in Zhang- Ke's dehumanised China that there is simply nowhere to run. In one scene, one characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Welcome to the new China.

A TOUCH OF SIN is a hard-hitting anthology from mainland China, looking at how social issues can lead to sudden bursts of unexpected and extreme violence. It's completely unlike the majority of Chinese mainstream movies, mostly concerned with propaganda and promoting Chinese values; this is much grittier, more downbeat, to the degree that it becomes completely nihilistic.

It's also a fine piece of cinema and thoroughly compelling. There are four stories here in which various injustices lead to violence, and of these the opening story, a DEATH WISH-style effort in which Jiang Wu's sympathetic lead is driven over the edge by the corruption he sees around him, is by far the best and most compelling. The second story has KUNG FU KILLER's Wang Baoqiang playing another baddie with a ruthless streak; the third has a dispossessed young woman who has been generally unlucky in life, while the last is a story of young and idealistic love. Although all of the stories are rather depressing, they're very well acted and directed, and the violence is superbly portrayed to the kind of shocking extreme that Hollywood just can't handle these days.

I found this Chinese film, like many other foreign language pictures in recent years, in the pages of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I hoped it would be another worthy entry. Basically set in present day modern China, apparently based on real events from the recent past, the film revolves around four characters from vastly different geographical locations of the country, and of different social backgrounds and surroundings. The stories, ranging from the busy southern metropolis of Guangzho and Donggaun to the more rural areas of towns such as Shanxi, see each character committing a random act of violence, and the individual stories focus on their often bizarre reasoning behind them, and whether they can get away with it, or face the consequences. Dahai (Wu Jiang) is an angry miner, enraged by widespread corruption in his village, he decides to take justice into his own hands. Zhou San (Baoqiang Wang) is a rootless migrant who discovers the infinite possibilities of owning a firearm, and it seems that anybody could be his next target. Xiao Yu (Tao Zhao) is a young receptionist who dates a married man man and works at a local sauna, but she is pushed beyond her limits by an abusive client, so goes out of her way to make them pay. Xiao Hui (Lanshan Luo) is a young factory worker who goes from one disheartening job to another, and he only faces increasingly degrading circumstances, it is unclear what truly leads him to off the edge. The four overlapping stories of characters going to extremes for different, mostly minor or bizarre reasons, are all interesting, their violent turns are the most memorable moments, and to see how they get on following their kills or whatever, there's a good amount of bloody stuff, it also works as a satirical look at how economic transformation changes people, a great drama. Very good!