Little Red Flowers, the latest from acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yuan, examines childhood through the lenses of rebellion, authority, and most poignantly of all, fatherhood.
Following the Taipei Film Festival screening of his most recent film, Little Red Flowers, mainland Chinese director Zhang Yuan commented that his first visit to Taipei also coincided with the director's first ever festival Q/A session sans interpreter. Zhang is a relatively long-standing festival circuit presence, with a feature filmmaking career spanning over 20 years. 1997's East Palace, West Palace was also an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, and Zhang's feature debut, The Girl from Huangshan (1985) is now over 20 years old. Yet, Zhang's first festival access to a Chinese-speaking audience occurred at 10:30 on a Sunday morning in a place where the director is not considered a citizen. Indeed, prior to the Taipei Film Festival, Little Red Flowers had screened at Berlin, Sundance, and Cannes Film Festivals, yet notably was absent from June's Shanghai Film Festival, the largest film festival in the Chinese mainland.
Zhang's delayed direct dialogue with Chinese-speaking audiences highlights one of the most intriguing tensions imbedded within the director's work. With the lone exception of 1996's Danish Girls Show Everything (1996), an 18-director collaboration edited by Finnish notable, Mika Kaurismaki, Zhang's stories have focused on the Chinese mainland. As in his 2003 work, I Love You, Zhang bases his Little Red Flowers narrative on the work of contemporary Beijing writer, Wang Shuo. Wang, best known for evoking the rebellious spirit of young Beijing as godfather of the "punk literature" (pizi wenxue) movement, is a fellow enfant terrible in the world of Chinese cultural politics. While Zhang by no means lacks in mainland cultural standing in 2006, the Chinese government's blacklisting of the director in 1994 following 1993's Beijing Bastards with rocker Cui Jian, has dramatically altered the reception of Zhang's films, even following 2003's mainland release of the popular romance, Green Tea.
As Zhang's first release following the mainstream, albeit commercially tepid, Green Tea, Little Red Flowers embodies the tension of a director situated between international audiences and domestic stories. With renowned Italian composer Carlo Crivelli at the auditory helm of the film, Dutch distributor Fortissimo, and Venice International Film Festival director Marco Mueller as one of the film's producers, Little Red Flowers takes on an intriguing mix of cultural influences, while preserving the story's deep origins in local literary and filmmaking communities.
Little Red Flowers is the story of four-year-old Fang Qiang Qiang (Dong Bowen), a little boy whose parents place him in a boarding kindergarten. From the first scene of the film, in which Fang bursts into tears immediately following an imposing close-up of his teacher, Ms. Li (Zhao Rui), the film examines authority and the complex relationship between the rulers and the ruled. With teachers cast as the kindly authoritarian rulers of a vast population of charmingly creative, yet frustratingly unruly babes, Zhang humorously shoots a world that outlines some of the most basic challenges of government, order and chaos.
Zhang deliberately obscures both the time and location of the film's space, using the timeless nostalgia of nursery school to create sets which evoke either the recent past or a gently used present. Interior shots of the boarding school form the backdrop for the bulk of the film's scenes. Unmoored to exterior spaces outside the school and tempered by the child-like magical realism of Fang Qiang Qiang's fertile imagination, obscured spatial and temporal bearings encourage abstract meditation on power and social control.
Framing Zhang's boarding kindergarten as a microcosm of the adult world is a tempting way to look at Little Red Flowers. However, Zhang's hyper-real collage of youthful moments instead highlights childhood not as a representation of adulthood, but rather, it asserts the artificiality of distinctions between the two. When Fang Qiang Qiang begins checking his classmates for the evidence of ancestral tails as part of his campaign to find monster Ms. Li's young accomplices, one need not exercise much anecdotal muscle to relate Fang's hunt back to the repeated campaigns for correctness, both physical and ideological, in Chinese history of the past century. Rather than encouraging his audience to become fixated by his precocious child actors because, shockingly, “They're just like adults!," Zhang makes a less popular assertion. Zhang instead argues that children differ little from adults because people actually change very little.
Embodying the story's central theme of power and control are the titular “little red flowers”, prizes rewarded to children who follow appropriate kindergarten procedures from the innocuous (dressing themselves) and to the disturbingly authoritarian (defecating at the appointed time of the day). Fang, both more of a baby, and more of free spirit than his classmates, always seems to have a problem understanding the rules, his face tinged with alternating expressions of pathos and defiance. Given the director's history with authority, one has to wonder to what degree perennial offender Zhang Yuan sympathizes with the plight of his protagonist.
If Zhang's casting choices are any indication, the story carries deep personal resonance. While Fang Qiangqiang (Dong Bowen) was cast from a wide net of auditions held over several months in Beijing, one of the story's young masterminds is Zhang's daughter, Ning Yuanyuan, who plays one of Fang's love interests and co-conspirators. In combination, Zhang's casting choice and his personal background highlight the exciting complexities of meaning embedded within the film's larger meditation on power and control. How does a rebel director become a responsible father? How can parents remember to think of their children as people rather than charges? Or, on a more theoretical level, how can authority and control coexist with creativity and individual personality?
In discussing the film, Zhang Yuan mentioned that his first encounter with Wang Shuo's novel was seven years ago. However, the director's choice to film only the first third of the Wang's text, set within a world of Zhang's daughter's contemporaries, seems to reflect Zhang's curiosity as both a filmmaker and a father, a way to reconcile his newfound dual role as both transgressor and disciplinarian.