Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
Cry Woman
Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.
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