A young Chinese director became one of the hot new success stories at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Liu Fen Dou’s “Green Hat,” which premiered on May 9th, won the jury’s choice for both best film and best new filmmaker in the narrative feature category, with prizes totaling $45,000.
In “Green Hat,” a two-hour-long feature, the 35-year-old director from Beijing, whose previous scripts have garnered international awards, pursues the themes of power, control, faith and betrayal through the sad private lives of two men. The film’s title comes from the symbol of humiliation in traditional Chinese culture for men whose wives have committed adultery.
Neither of the men can cope with wearing these green hats, which may be imaginary in a physical sense but is an all-too-real an image for them. The hats lead them down the road of violence against themselves and others.
It is strong stuff, so strong that it is unlikely that the movie will get an above-ground showing on the mainland. There is plenty of violence, nudity, numerous references to sexual organs, and more than a smattering of the Beijing slang equivalent of the “F” word. “They won’t allow it to be shown there,” Liu said in an interview. “The open discussion about sex contradicts the cultural base of Confucianism.”
Still Liu, who shows a short clip of Chairman Mao smiling and waving to the masses before his movie, is reluctant to criticize censorship in China. “I don’t want to portray myself as being repressed in China. I don’t want to categorize my movies as underground or even independent,” he said. “I don’t want to attract attention by any label. If the audience likes my movie, it should be because of the movie itself.”
Lui doesn’t even want to label “Green Hat,” which was produced by the Hong Kong company Almost Entertainment Pictures, as a Chinese movie. “The story happens to be based in China. But it can happen anywhere in the world. It focuses on human struggle,” he said.
Indeed, he bristled in front of a packed audience during a question-and-answer session when somebody noted that he wouldn’t get a subsidy for making such a movie from the Chinese government. “Your government won’t give money to Hollywood movies, would they?” responded Liu, who also noted that Hollywood has its own ideology.
Resisting being labeled has been a theme of Liu’s career. Born in a Beijing intellectual family, Liu disappointed his professor parents by not going to college after high school. “I don’t think schools can teach you how to be an artist,” he said. Liu jumped between manual jobs while he concentrated on writing novels and screenplays.
The cooperation with then-first-time director Zhang Yang on the 1997 blockbuster “Love Spicy Soup” paved the way for Liu as a writer when the movie swept almost all the available domestic awards in that year. His other movies include: “A Beautiful New World” (1998); “Shower” (2000); and “Spring Subway” (2001); they all received awards overseas.
Liu may be considered by movie critics to be part of the “Seventh Generation,” the latest group of young Chinese movie makers, but he doesn’t like it. “The concept of generation is made up by the academic movie institution graduates in order to put an exclusive, glorious ring above their own heads,” said Liu. “I’m not one of them.”
Liu is obsessive about his own privacy. Repeated requests by this reporter to take pictures of him were rebuffed. “I want to keep a low profile as much as possible. I don't want my family to be disturbed,” said Liu, who divorced his American anthropologist wife and whose son lives in the States with his mother.
“For me, movies are all about expression and communication. If you make something the audience doesn’t understand, it’s not because you made an ‘art movie’ but because you haven’t expressed yourself clearly,” said Liu. “If it keeps happening to you, you’d better try to find something else to do.”
Certainly, the movie got an overwhelmingly positive reception from those who attended the premiere, although it succeeded in taking many people out of their comfort zone. One audience member, physical education consultant Isobel Kleinman, described the movie as well-made and “brutally frank,” but also worried that she felt “as if I was exploiting somebody’s bedroom, which is a bit disturbing.”
