Night Train
One of the frankest Chinese movies ever made about sexual desire, guilt and submission"I've been having this recurrent dream," says Diao Yinan (previously writer-director of the highly subversive Uniform), "in which I'm sentenced to death for no particular reason. I admit that I fear death... and wish I had a brave heart. There came the idea for this film."
His protagonist this time is a woman, Wu Hongyan, who works as a court bailiff in an industrial town in the west of China. 30 years old and unmarried, she is trying to meet a potential husband through a dating club in the nearest city but discovers that it's a scam. Nothing works out until she meets a loner named Li Jun and feels something for the first time. He guards a remote dam and reservoir and invites her to visit. But Li is the husband of a prisoner on death row who she arrested...
There are distant echoes of Hitchcock's Suspicion in the plot, but suspense is only a small part of Diao's interest. Working again outside the framework of Film Bureau control and censorship, he has crafted one of the frankest Chinese movies ever made about sexual desire - and about the masochism of guilt and submission.
Tony Rayns
