The Treatment of Fact in Saturday Fiction
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WARNING: This review contains spoilers
In Saturday Fiction (2019), Chinese ‘sixth generation’ director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Blind Massage), famed for his use of disjunctive editing and a roving handheld camera, makes a triumphant return to the silver screen with a tale of romance and espionage set during WWII. The film is set in wartime Shanghai, which came to be known as “solitary island” as Japanese troops surrounded Shanghai in the winter of 1937, tactically avoiding the foreign concession areas owned by European colonial powers such as Great Britain and France. As such, Shanghai quickly became a hotbed of intelligence for both Axis and Allied powers during the war.
The protagonist Jean Yu, played by Chinese screen legend Gong Li, is a celebrated actress who arrives in Shanghai to perform at the Lyceum Theatre in a play called Saturday Fiction. The director of this play, Tan Na (Mark Zhao), was once involved in a romantic affair with Jean, and it quickly becomes clear that he is still deeply in love with her. Throughout the film, we are introduced to several other characters, including her foster father Frederic Hubert (Pascal Greggory), who owns a mysterious bookstore in Shanghai, an ex-husband (Zhang Songwen), who is arrested by Japanese forces, and an obsessive fan called Bai Mei (Huang Xianglin), who constantly stalks Jean Yu through the streets of Shanghai.
Jean Yu decides to stay at the luxurious Cathay Hotel, where her phone has been bugged by a series of men unbeknown to her or the audience. The complexity of the plot, combined with the director’s intentional blurring of fact and fiction (director Lou Ye uses a metacinema narrative style to capture the feeling of a theatre production), invites viewers to keep thinking: who exactly is Jean Yu? Why has she come to Shanghai? What will she do?
The scene in which Jean Yu’s ex-husband is killed near the gate of the Cathay Hotel functions as a climax and reveals the main conflict of the film – the intelligence reports pertaining to the imminent attack on Shanghai by the Japanese forces. A Japanese intelligence officer named Saburo (Joe Odagiri) comes to Shanghai to deliver his army’s latest operational codes, which Hubert, who conducts intelligence operations for the Allied Forces, wants to acquire. To stop Saburo, Hubert asks Jean Yu to return to Shanghai as she resembles Saburo’s dead wife. Jean Yu begrudgingly follows the orders of her foster father, injecting a dose of an unknown substance into Saburo that forces him to reveal his secret – that the Japanese will attack Pearl Harbour. In a somewhat highly strategic move, Jean Yu decides not to tell her father about the attack, which effectively results in the US joining in the war when Pearl Harbour is ‘unexpectedly’ attacked.
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Unsurprisingly, the film has proven controversial in China. Many people who saw the film in cinemas shared their thoughts and feelings online. In addition to the effect created by Lou Ye’s uneasy style of cinematography, shaky images and broken plot in disorientating viewers, the film’s choice of setting in Shanghai, an enormous metropolis where native Chinese and foreigners brush shoulders in its crowded streets and smoky bars, could not be any more perfect for capturing a sense of mystery and suspicion. Similarly, the production design is able to successfully recreate the distressed splendour of Shanghai during the war, best summed up by a long fly-over shot of the rainy city at the beginning of the film.
Audiences have also expressed mixed feelings towards the female spy played by Gong Li. Before the release of Saturday Fiction, previous films such as Lust, Caution and The Message helped to create the stereotype of the Chinese female spy. Played by stars such Tang Wei, Li Bingbing and Zhou Xun, the character of the female spy depicted in these movies is overtly sexualised: they drink and smoke to release stress, wear revealing clothes, and indulge in a host of forbidden pleasures. Gong Li’s character is different. Not only is she a star of the theatre, but also plays a decisive role in the counterintelligence operation against the Japanese. However, viewers are bound to pay more attention to her incompatibility with the theatre director Tan Na. The actor who plays him, Mark Zhao, is a youthful and energetic idol for many among China’s current younger generation and has been criticised by some viewers as he looks more like Jean Yu’s son than her lover.
Saturday Fiction encapsulates the difficulty of producing a historical film in China. No matter how hard the film tries to create a sense of historical authenticity, the film will undoubtedly suffer from the lack of respect that has grown in recent years for the way that historical events are shown on screen. This is due to the tendency of Chinese TV and film studies to distort and exaggerate elements of the past in order to appear sufficiently patriotic or adhere to the CCP’s official line on historical events. Perhaps this explains why the director uses his camera to blur the distinction between the scenes of stage rehearsals and daily life, echoing the idea that fact and fiction are often blurred in contemporary Chinese society.
