The Dark Night of the Soul

In

the opening scene of Blind Shaft, a hard-boiled thriller from first time writer/director Li Yang, a trio of men descends into the bowels of a fly-by-night Chinese coal mine. As darkness blots out the men's faces, the camera swings upward to linger on the shrinking rectangle of light above their heads. Then it, too, disappears. And for a claustrophobic moment we and the actors are left in stifling blackness. Headlamps eventually snap on, but the film itself remains deliberately, and powerfully, murky.

Song Jinming and Tang Zhaoyang make their living off a deadly scam: they lure a third itinerant worker into taking a job at an illegal mine. Once below ground they kill him with a pickaxe, claim the ceiling of the mine collapsed on him, and demand hush-money from their boss in return for not notifying the government of the "accident." Then they wire the payoff home to their families, pass the night with a couple of worn-out looking hookers, and set off in pursuit of another victim. Their confidence in their game hits a snag though when the two snare an innocent 16-year-old for their next kill. Song's resolve wavers while Tang's hardens. From then on the film becomes ever tenser, building in suspense until its surprising final act.

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Never has a mainland Chinese film ventured so far into the country's seamy, desolate underbelly. Li could not have picked a more charged backdrop for his social Darwinist drama than China's notoriously unsafe illegal mines, which claim the lives of thousands each year. The mines are emblems for capitalism run amok in a world where, as one mine boss grunts, "The only thing not in short supply is human beings."

Li's cinematic style is rough and naturalistic. The scenes look so real that if not for the tautly structured plot, it would be easy to forget the film is a fiction. (A recently naturalized German citizen, Li shot it underground—figuratively and literally—striking deals with mine owners while steering clear of censors in Beijing.) The killers are not caricatured villains: Li treats them with neither contempt nor pity—they are just trying to make ends meet. And unlike most mainland films that deal with social problems, Blind Shaft indulges neither in tears nor sermons.

Traversing central China's frozen landscape of slag heaps and shanties, Blind Shaft's grubby miners lead us to the heart of contemporary China's search for its soul. Song and Tang spend their days in one kind of black hole and make their choices in another. The China they know is a moral vacuum. "These days," says Tang to Song while they watch the news on TV of a government corruption scandal, "the only thing that isn't fake is a mother's feelings for her kid." Song shrugs and reckons that's probably not real either.

China's commissars, needless to say, are not among the film's many fans. Li has picked up prizes at a host of prestigious festivals, including Berlin, Tribeca and Hong Kong. But earlier this month Beijing demanded that the Indian government withdraw the film from competition at the International Film Festival of India. Naturally, it won't be shown in Chinese theaters either. That's too bad. For out of his homeland's darkest reaches, Li has brought forth a gem.