The Movies

The Promise

By Junius

They have announced, at $30 million, The Promise is the most costly Chinese film ever made. Like any other blockbuster, then, this one will have to depend on the first weekend’s box office before word gets around that it is a horribly acted, trite melodrama. The initial release was in China, where 10 million people supposedly saw it. If seats were $3, the producers have already broken even, and the rest is gravy. Hurrah for computer-activated fight scenes and false tears! I see masses of peasants craning their necks in Hunan. Pablum for the people: Cinderella and her fairy godmother; a slave who becomes a prince.

However, there might just be more in the film than meets the eye. The director Chen Kaige is quoted in a Georgia Straight interview making a vey serious point out of his own experience. He had gone back to a part of China he had known well: “It was a very beautiful region, but we did terrible things to it, chopping down trees.” It had been turned into an industrial rubber-tree farm. “We all need to think about how high a price we’re willing to pay for change.” That’s a perception that could infuse a very worthwhile film. Unless there is a heavily muffled allegory of contemporary China in The Promise, Chen Kaige seems to have gone in the opposite direction, into pure fable.

But maybe there is, after all, a deeply embedded allegory. Maybe Chen Kaige knows his Chinese audience is attuned to allegory and will understand the little starving girl as China personified making the wrong decision: China bartering her soul for personal prosperity. Chen Kaige knows that rubber-tree plantations are nothing compared with the projected demand of Chinese production for 2600 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, like adding four power plants every week for the next 45 years. He knows there are 140 million Chinese families saving up for a car and demanding roads to drive on. He knows that China, even without India, can destroy the planet utterly. Maybe this is in his film: the promise to sacrifice oneself to gain material goods is the allegorical warning, and when the ennobled slave runs so fast that he not only breaks the sound barrier but also the time barrier and gets the girl back in time to change the bad promise to a good one, this is the message of a second chance for China to change direction.

If this allegory is really clear to that craning audience in Hunan, the potential Volkswagoners, then the film is important. But it is so heavily overlaid by melodrama that it’s certainly not clear to us, and in any case it doesn’t make the acting less wooden and the fights less boringly acted.