A Touch of Sin

Four ordinary Chinese people, exasperated by homegrown crass materialism, rise against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to vent their opposition in violent but realistic and deeply personal ways. 


In a manner familiar to Western filmgoers in US director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2011), writer and director Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin connects four unrelated narratives with related themes into single story. In the opening sequence, one of the four main characters passes another on a motorbike; other characters appear as the story moves through the Chinese heartland.

This film gives a fascinating and unvarnished local view of how the Chinese heartland looks to a Chinese person. The story is realistically violent, and also beautifully told in pictures. It cannot be an accident that so many shots are composed with images that contrast the old and new Chinas, such as traditional structures and piles of rubble amid new development. Ordinary Chinese themselves, young and old, are portrayed much in the same way. Chinese government people appear in the background, not oppressive but disinterested in people as individuals. The lawless violence and crass materialism may account for why this picture is banned in China, but the visceral reality it captures must have struck an official nerve.

Wu Jiang seeks a reckoning in the wuxia genre film A Touch of Sin.

In several scenes we see well-attended street theater—small but elaborate proscenia set up in rural towns where there are no cinemas—in which actors in traditional costumes appear to be putting on fairy-tale dramas, but which most likely reflect their captivated audiences’ ordinary lives or local events. This gives an insight into what director Jia Zhangke may be doing with his four stories.

There is a popular fiction genre in China known as wuxia, which are fantasy revenge tales involving individual righteous martial arts practitioners fighting oppressors, righting wrongs and exacting retribution for past misdeeds. This genre has a long history, with recent heydays in parts of the 20th century. It is ideal for comic book or graphic novel depiction.

The violence in this film works more like the street plays we see than the gratuitous mayhem of kinetic blood-splattering, flying-through-the-air martial arts action films East and West, though the English title is said to allude to the classic 1971 action picture A Touch of Zen directed by King Hu. In Chinese, the title means ‘doomed fate’. The film is ‘entertainment’ in the sense that it is a blow-valve for expressing in real ways action that an ordinary person might like to take but would not.     

Baoqiang Wang rides into trouble in A Touch of Sin.

Jia Zhangke immediately gets our attention, opening his story with a slight man on an old motorbike, bundled up against the cold in black with a Chicago Bulls watch cap, accosted by three scraggly hatchet-wielding youths on a rural highway under construction…

Each of the four stories, told serially, feature a main character and the people in their lives, all of whom one would guess are easily recognizable to a Chinese audience.


Wu Jiang has a Toshiro Mifune-like screen presence in A Touch of Sin

Dahai (Wu Jiang) is a well-respected man in Wujinshan, a coal-mining town in Shanxi, a rural province west of Beijing. He and his fellow townspeople appear to live lives little changed from the pre-capitalist period, yet their former peers who ‘privatized’ the mine into the Shengli Group now live like rich Westerners. Dahai is a middle aged man with a strong, Toshiro Mifune-like screen presence; an epi-pen and a relatively new army-style overcoat suggest that he may have been discharged from the military for diabetes.

Baoqiang Wang avoids the law in A Touch of Sin.

Zhou San (Baoqiang Wang), the ‘third son’ of a rural family, apparently travels around the country either as a freewheeling bandit or a murderer for hire. His story reportedly is based on that of a real-life bandit, but we just see him kill prosperous-looking people or those foolish enough not to leave him alone. He has sent a lot of money home, but the one ‘robbery’ we see appears to have been done only to conceal a contract hit.       

Zhao Tao and Zhang Jia-yi part in A Touch of Sin.

Zheng Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao, the wife of director Jia Zhangke) works at the Night-Comer Sauna in Yichang, a city in Hubei province in the Chinese heartland. The Night-Comer is a sex business, but Xiao Yu does maintenance, not sex work. She is the longtime lover of Zhang Youliang (Zhang Jia-yi), a well-to-do, middle-aged married man who will not leave his wife to be with her.

Lanshan Luo and Meng Li share a quiet moment in A Touch of Sin.

Xiao Hui (Lanshan Luo) flees a Hunan province sweatshop for a ‘Fortune 500’ sweatshop in Dongguan, an industrial city in Guangzhou province on the outskirts of the world-class international port of Shenzhen near Hong Kong. The Fortune 500 sweatshop turns out to be no better than the first, so a friend connects him with an international tourist hotel in Guangzhou city where he becomes a bellhop with the hotel’s thriving ‘Communist’ sex fetish sideline and meets Xiao Hui (Meng Li as Vivien Li), one of the sex workers, whom he first saw on the train to Dongguan.



Meng Li as a 'Communist fetish' sex worker in A Touch of Sin.

 These characters’ stories are compelling, based on true events, and the storytelling and cinematography is brilliant and worth more than one viewing. 

A Touch of Sin 天注定 (Tian zhuding) China 2013 (129 minutes). Written and directed by Jia Zhangke; cinematography Yu Likwai; music by Giong Lim; edited by Matthieu Laclu and Xudong Lin; art direction by Weixin Liu; sets by Daiyu He.