Shanghai Trance (2008)

Directed by: David Verbeek | 122 minutes | drama | Actors: Tian Yuan, Lu Yulai, Zhang Heng, Tygo Gernandt, Cheng Haofeng, Xiao Han

Director David Verbeek studied film in the Netherlands and America and lived in Shanghai for a few years. He has a predilection for Chinese cinema and has already made a Chinese film for the VPRO. This subject does not come completely out of the blue and apparently his earlier projects made an impression here, because ‘Shanghai Trance’ was also financed with Dutch money. And so he, a Dutchman, made an entirely Chinese spoken film in Shanghai, with an almost one hundred percent Chinese cast.

Not that Verbeek himself speaks fluent Chinese, besides using his minimal knowledge of the language, he learned the words of the script by heart and was able to correct the actors where necessary. And not everyone was Chinese, Tygo Gernandt plays Jochem, the Dutch oddball, who speaks little Chinese and is only half accepted, a character for which Verbeek drew inspiration from his own experiences.

By the way, we too, the viewers in this film are strange ducks in the bite. The camera acts like the eyes of a puzzled tourist who looks around in wonder in this crazy world, taking a long time for each new phenomenon that is caught by his gaze; a way in which a native does not (anymore) look. This is a China that most people don’t know yet. And that makes the film interesting and fascinating, although that ‘other China’ (ie no crawling tiger and no idyllic countryside pictures) can’t be called beautiful, rather disturbingly ugly.

The young protagonists also have a hard time with this China, this city. Their parents want them to be successful in a world that is all about work and money, combined with fairly traditional views on male and female roles, and that between fifty-storey high concrete residential blocks and offices (without seeing the difference). The alternative is the modern nightlife, although not something to look forward to. Are there any other alternatives? Not really, because Shanghai doesn’t seem to offer more, with its thirteen million inhabitants and ninety branches of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which fit in a city where nobody seems to want and be able to create the time and space to really enjoy (which symbolizes poverty better than that?).

The camera is of course never really objective, yet nobody can completely withdraw from the image that this is ‘the world in decline’, in which total emptiness and destructive routine lurk. Then let’s just love each other in God’s name and get through it together, but that doesn’t turn out to be much more difficult. Sometimes it’s the shots that get boring, by the way, they sometimes take a bit too long, especially when no one says what it is all about.

This does not seem like a hopeful film, but it is also not a manifesto to bring down Shanghai, China or Western thinking, the images are neutral enough for that, the characters and everything that happens are too unappealed for that. No, this is a genuine attempt to portray a terrifying reality, which is only made bearable by seeing that we are dealing with real people and with real people there are always possibilities, new opportunities. But whether the growth, the metropolitan decay, the ugliness and the emptiness can still be completely reversed? For the time being, ‘they’ (read also: ‘we’) simply want prosperity, at all costs. The hope lies in the fact that the young people in the film don’t fully agree with this either, they don’t know it anymore. They are numb, in a trance.

David Verbeek delivers a film of international format. Because of the long shots and many silences, the whole is a bit longer than necessary, but the shots hit hard, beautiful in ugliness, confrontational and honest. He delivers a handsome contemporary portrait of a relentlessly growing nightmare called Shanghai.