QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM THE RED SEA
Six-year-old Mao Qing (Chen Halin) lives with her mother Hongmei (Li Yanxi) in a small farming village of China, a remote and sparsely populated community surrounded mostly by endless wheat fields. Statues of the ancient Song Dynasty dot the landscape, reminding viewers that these people are deeply connected to the past. Grandmother (Wang Lanhua) and psychic “crazy lady” Wenjuan (Nan Cui) complete the picture of a vaguely dysfunctional family unit consisting almost exclusively of female characters.
The life of our protagonist is not uneventful. Mao Qing gets constantly bullied in school for being the “daughter of a slut”, in reference to her mother’s turbulent affair to an electrician (the father works remotely, and it is his absence that allowed for his wife to engage in an extramarital relation). She befriends a pallid boy of around her age and entirely dressed in white, who is desperately searching for his mother. It becomes increasingly clear that Mao Qing is the only person able to see this ghostlike figure, or at least the only willing to engage with the lost soul (and to help him to achieve his objectives).
Yanxi delivers the film’s most heart-wrenching performance. Her despair at being chastised by the man he loves – while also being mortified in front of her neighbours and friends – is genuinely palpable.
Much of Nighttime Sounds is structured like a horror film. The weather is consistently cloudy and gloomy. The golden wheat fields and the pockets of dark green vegetation provide a touch of eeriness to the proceedings. The handheld camera and the shadowy environments imbue the story with a perpetual sense of suspense. Dark underground tunnels and unused sewer lines feature in Mao Qing’s imagination as well as in her daily routine. Gently shaking garments on a clothesline provide the perfect hiding place for elusive spectres. A transparent raincoat floats around in the sky much like a jellyfish in the ocean. The tub-thumping noise of a long-gone relative oppresses the living. Yet it isn’t jump scares that second-time director Zhang Zhongchen seeks to provoke. Instead, he uses these metaphysical elements in order to illustrate social oppression and existential angst.
Nighttime Sounds is a sensory experience. The mouth, the ears and the eyes of a statue are covered with snails, emphasising the synesthetic nature of the film. Mao and her best friend bury themselves in the ground in the hope of growing vigorously, much like the wheatgrass. The crushing of the plantation, the preserving of eggs and the repeated singing/humming of a song cater for various senses: the visual, the auditory and even the gustatory. Audiences are urged to be quiet and pay attention to the subtle details of the film. That’s not a particularly easy task for boisterous Saudi audiences, used to the recently-discovered movie theatre as a social space where talking and even using your phone is largely tolerated – however most people did comply with the polite request.
On the other hand, the storyline is somewhat disjointed. This otherworldly picture of Chinese rural customs will send viewers running down the wheat fields only to abandon them there, feeling lost and confused. It’s difficult to make out some of the most basic developments without reading a synopsis (particularly the role of the nearby excavation sites, and the antiquity of the 800-year-old statues). The ending – while infused with remarkably haunting imagery – is barely comprehensible. I doubt such was the director’s intention. Plus, the “social realist” ambitions of the movie are unrealised (the film has been marketed and repeatedly described as such). The struggles of the working class are barely discernible here, with the narrative focus remaining firmly on the cryptic, the supernatural and the allegorical instead.
Nighttimes Sounds showed in the 5th Red Sea International Film Festival. Zhang Zhongchen grew up in the Chinese countryside, before taking up a job in a factory, He eventually became a security guard in the Beijing Film Academy, before making it to the editor’s room and from there to the forefront of filmmaking. A remarkable journey from the factory floor to the director’s seat.
