Huang Jianxin's BACK TO BACK, FACE TO FACE (1994) review

(Though he's now (indirectly) best known in the West for The Founding of a Republic making the PRC very large sums of money, director Huang Jianxin remains one of Chinese cinema's best-kept secrets. For more than twenty years he's been making films documenting the vagaries of contemporary life on the mainland, the best of them richly detailed, funny, intelligent and thoughtful, but outside of a few festival appearances and academic citations he's gone largely unrecognised outside his domestic market. In the hope of pointing out he's done quite a bit more than co-direct one of the highest profile works of propaganda ever conceived, here's some of his work that deserves more attention.)

Hell hath no fury like a civil servant spurned, apparently. In 1994's Back to Back, Face to Face, Huang Jianxin explores the lengths a minor functionary ends up going to in order to make life miserable for everyone who's ever wronged him.

The premise in and of itself isn't new - plenty of Western cultural icons owe much of their fame to the comic potential of the cynicism, back-biting and vitriol endemic to office politics (think Ricky Gervais, Mike Judge or Neil LaBute before he lost his better judgement). What makes Back to Back more distinctive is its position taken in context. The script and performances would make for riveting watching set against any cultural background but set within the Chinese bureaucracy it becomes another demonstration of Huang's talent, where a film can be a relatively innocuous black comedy on one hand and a jaw-droppingly vicious satire on the other.

The central figure - in no sense a hero - is Wang Shuangli, a petty official in an unnamed city who for the past three years has served as acting director of the local party cultural centre. When Wang hears those above him are commissioning an opinion poll on who ought to be the long-awaited director proper he's so certain of landing the post at last he sticks his own name on the paper.

Surely he deserves it? Wang's run things for so long he has his own circle of cronies who've climbed on board with him. He casually waves petty abuses of the system on through with the air of a man who's not going anywhere any time soon, from redistributing funds to intentionally sabotaging the test results when the centre is expected to hold auditions for a new subordinate.

But predictably, things don't turn out the way Wang hoped; coldly furious at being passed over, he elects to make life hell for his replacement, a decision which subsequently escalates matters ever further despite all his cunning.

Back to Back isn't remotely graphic; there's only one scene featuring any kind of actual violence, with little in that to bother the censors. But while the film is frequently hilarious it is blackly comic with it more often than not, and the darkness comes from the stupefying levels of emotional savagery behind the petty abuses these characters visit on each other.

This isn't a case of Huang trying to insinuate China is effectively a capitalist society, blaming any perceived moral decay on the inevitable side effects of a free market economy. These people are supposedly good citizens - they're largely sticking to the letter of the law, and any offences they're guilty of count for very little in the scheme of things.

Still, take the scene where Wang and the party accountant harangue the new director's right-hand man - firstly over a petty theft he didn't commit, secondly over falsifying receipts (something no worse than much of what the two of them are already guilty of). They eviscerate him, pushing the man near to a complete breakdown, he's that humiliated. Niu Zhentuo as Wang is shockingly effective here; think Fan Wei (City of Life and Death) turned sour and poisonous.

This would be enough for a successful production by itself, but then Huang's screenplay turns back on itself; Wang has been unfairly passed over, remember, and Back to Back isn't shy about painting the upper levels of the party hierarchy as every bit as small-minded as he is. No-one engenders sympathy as such, but their frustration is perfectly real, recognisably human.

It's not a perfect film; at nearly two and a half hours, it's punishingly long, partly because of the unrelenting jibes and partly because the structure and pacing don't quite match the writing and performances. The ending peters out, unable to settle on either Hollywood redemption or enigmatic closure and falling uncomfortably in between. Visually, too, Back to Back is relatively unexceptional - Huang's direction has noticeably improved here from his earlier films but it's still fairly workmanlike, closer to a solid television miniseries than anything particularly cinematic.

Predictably ignored outside the mainland - it is arguably both not at all culturally specific and completely so - and not without its flaws Back to Back, Face to Face is still a neglected little gem of a film. Unquestionably one of Huang Jianxin's best, for those viewers who like their satire blacker than black it comes highly recommended.