"An endless rain": sticky polar on a changing China

"Endless rain": sticky polar on a changing China
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AFP / File
/ Toshifumi KITAMURA

Young women murdered in China, a few months before the handover of Hong Kong. A man obsessed with these crimes drowns in the investigation. Chinese director Dong Yue's first film, "Endless rain" is a very dark picture of a country in the process of change

"I wanted to write a story about the atmosphere in China before the major reforms of the late 90s, "says the filmmaker, born in 1976.

Titled in English" The Looming Storm ", his film received in the spring the Grand Prix of the police film festival Beaune, a year after "Confidential Cairo."

"An Endless Rain" is built on a flashback and dates back to 1997 when Yu Guowei, the security chief of a factory arrives at the scene of a murder. She is the fourth woman killed in this place and under these circumstances.

Quickly, this model employee will go looking for the serial killer, defying the police whose investigation patina.

Narrative of an obsession and genre film, the feature film owes a lot to his actor main Duan Yihong, its heavy atmosphere, its gray universe, always accompanied by a pouring rain.

It is the view obstructed by rain, among silhouettes hidden behind large hoods, that Yu Guowei will try to find the murderer. A quest that will make him lose his footing.

"This climate is also my impression of the social and economic transformations that occurred in China in the late 1990s. People could not soothe their anxieties, they had no hope, "says the director, who deliberately desaturated the colors to get a dull palette.

If his film evokes the polar" Memories of murder "(2003) Korean Bong Joon-ho by his narrative of a (in) desperate search, he dwells more on the atmosphere and the obsessional aspect of the main character, even leaving a little intrigue.

The director, who claims Hitchcock ("Cold Sweats") and Coppola ("Secret Conversation") as a source of inspiration, takes the opportunity to paint a picture of a China that no longer exists: that of employees working to life in a factory.

"Many workers who thought their work tool belonged to them had to leave these state factories where they had worked all their lives, and they had to accept the idea that they were abandoned by society and by the time, "says Dong Yue, in the notes of intention of the film.

20/07/2018 12:54:49 –
Paris (AFP) –
© 2018 AFP