A Touch of Sin

MOVIE #1,106 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 08.14.23 PART OF THE JIA ZHANGKE DIRECTOR FOCUS Alright party people and JZ-Heads, after a slew of somewhat interesting yet tedious documentary efforts, we return with the Chinese auteur’s first proper work of fiction since 2006’s fantastic Still Life. In A Touch of Sin he utilizes a loose anthology approach similar to that movie, but with an even more overt, segmented approach. It’s also his most violent picture by a wide margin (really his only violent film to date). It’s extremely good.

It’s also of note that this is his only post-The World production that was banned in China, and supposedly not because of the violence. Depicting fictional adaptations of several real news stories (the Foxconn suicides for example), I guess it hit a little too close to home for his country’s censors.

Though the character motivations are slight at best, I felt that added to the fragility of the intermingling narratives. We know just one thing for certain: that things are gonna come undone. It’s a weird hyper-stylistic turn, not just with the violence but with the acting and action surrounding it. Especially after everything else has been so raw, realistic, and minimalist (those Still Life spaceships notwithstanding). Jia’s wife and constant collaborator, Zhao Tao, is really hamming it up with this new flair for blood and guts…


That the final stanza — based loosely on the aforementioned Foxconn tragedies — ends only in self-harm is a poignant stamp. Violence is all around. It seeps from society and plagues the individual: both external and internal. Can an animal commit suicide? Of course it can.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
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A Touch of Sin (Chinese: 天注定; lit. 'Destiny') is a 2013 Chinese anthology thriller film written and directed by Jia Zhangke and starring Jiang Wu, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan, and Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and longtime collaborator. The film consists of four loosely interconnected tableaus set in vastly different geographical and social milieus across modern-day China, based on recent events while also drawing from wuxia stories and Chinese opera. The English title references A Touch of Zen. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, with Jia winning the award for Best Screenplay. It was released on May 17, 2013.