Starring: Yi Zhang, Haocun Liu, Wei Fan
Distributor: Rialto Films
Runtime: 102 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2021
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Rural China, the Cultural Revolution, movie reels travel the countryside with propaganda films for the collective audiences. A stranger desperately wants to see the film.
Audiences were ready to see One Second at the 2019 Berlinale but the film was withdrawn four days before screening, allegedly post-production problems, which most understood as some form of censorship and disagreement with the contents of the film and/or its impact. It was eventually released in China in 2020.
This story of censorship is surprising since the film was cowritten and directed by veteran and acclaimed director, Zhang (chief director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics). He began directing films at age 37 in 1988 with Red Sorghum, making an impact with his drama, history, photographic beauty. This continued during the 1990s, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qui Ju. After the impact of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which he admired, he made a number of spectacular and colourful historical martial arts epics. During the 2010s, he has tackled a variety of themes and styles.
However, in 1999-2000, he made two quietly domestic but very moving smaller films, Not One Less and The Road Home. For this reviewer, they were journeys into China – quieter and emotional journeys, meeting the people, familiar dilemmas and crises. One Second is very much in this vein and all the more welcome for it.
The setting is 1975, with the impact of the Cultural Revolution as background. It is a story of cinema – travelling movie reels to remote rural towns, where newsreels and propaganda films such as the 1964 Heroic Sons and Daughters, keep the audience rapt and singing along with the patriotic songs, despite having seen the films before. Zhang notes the ‘collective experience’ of these decades (in the knowledge that present generations are moving away to more individual experiences).
In many ways, the plot is small. We first see a ragged man walking through the sand dunes. The individual is so small against the dunes. Who is he? It takes some time for us to find out as he wanders the desert, arriving in the town, too late to see the movie, encountering an orphan girl who steals a reel, pursuing her, recovering the reel and then losing it. So, not only who is he, but what is so important about the reel?
We have some sympathy for the man wandering the desert, clashing with the girl, recovering and losing the reel, getting lifts in trucks, eager to drink from the local tap, hungrily devouring noodles, and people regarding him suspiciously.
So, here we are, in a remote town, the people gathering, eager to watch the film – but a long episode, where a reel has fallen off the back of the cart and lies tangled in dust on the road. The stranger is desperate. The proud local projectionist takes charge and a huge cleaning, communal effort, follows.
And then we discover what the One Second is, a glimpse of film that the stranger eagerly wants to see, desperately wants. And we learn who is one, what his experience has been, what the sequence contains – pathos for him, pathos for us, the audience.
There is more pathos when we learn who the orphan is, her studious little brother, the custom of making lampshades from film strips and the reason for her stealing the reel. Some bonding between the stranger and the orphan, after some fights, physical, some desperation on his part, some hurt on her part for her brother on hers.
Then, the film seems to end sadly out there in the dunes. But, in fact, there is an epilogue, two years later, the Cultural Revolution over, prisoners freed, children better clothed and educated, and the stranger and the orphan meeting again, returning to the dunes, memories of sadness but, could we hope, a better future?
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