'Ermo': New Chinese Cinema

August 26, 1997

The so-called "New"Chinese Cinema, spanning the epoch since the demise of Mao and the reopening of the Beijing Central Film Academy - China's only film school - after the Cultural Revolution, has produced a series of works heavy in allegory and often in conflict with the country's cultural watchdogs. Products of the system, those who criticize it are viewed as biting the hand that fed them, leading to numerous scuffles over the showing of Chinese films both outside and inside the country. Strategies devised to circumvent the conflict vary from the use of foreign money (especially by Zhan Yi-Mou (Raising the Red Lantern), perhaps the best-known Chinese filmmaker) to going with the flow and relying on the use of more subtle means of social comment, as in Ermo.

Capitalism - in all its bare-assed, green monster primeval greediness - is the butt of Zhu Xio-Wen's sarcasm in Ermo. Following in the footsteps of the Italian Neo-Realist school, Xio-Wen uses the seemingly boring, repetitive routine of daily drudgery as the skeleton for his point (albeit, heaven help us, it's one that requires the audience to THINK about the meaning rather than be spoonfed wallops of obvious plot development 'a la' your average Hollywood film). Throw in a thinly-veiled subplot reference about the effects of ineffectual old men running a country, and the elements are complete.

Ermo (Alia) makes and sells twisty dry noodles in the local town. A constant motif throughout the film is this Marxian process of work: conception, construction, reflection on the finished product. Ermo dourly accepts the necessity of drudgery, kneading the flour, her feet freshly dipped in water, straining every muscle of her slender frame as she squeezes the dough through the wooden slots to produce the slivers she weaves into sellable bundles. She's the provider, married to the aged former village chief who whines about his ailments as she waits on him acceptingly. Her child is obsessed by the "goggle box" and constantly nags to go to the neighbor's house and watch it. Blindman (Liu Peiqi) owns a beat-up truck which earns him a nice income, but he's married to Fat Woman (we never learn of any other name for her) who wallows in her artificially inflated sense of self-importance as keeper of the only TV set in the village.

Ermo decides "BASTA YA!!" (enough) and focuses on her mission: to get that 29" TV set, bigger, better, faster ("mine's bigger than yours, mine's bigger than yours!") and further shove it in the gloating neighbor's face by having an affair with her husband, Blindman. And she'll do anything it takes, even selling her blood, in her single-minded determination. Anything, that is, but prostitute her body.

At times, I found the soulless emptiness of single-minded devotion to the pursuit of things, at the expense of the spirit, heart-wrenching to watch. The whole village crowds around the set, and Ermo curls up into a little ball next to it, rocking blankly from side to side in the knowledge of the pointlessness of it all. The incongruity of Chinese villagers watching an American football game ("that's called baseball!") and blond foreigners talking Mandarin ("the TV can talk any language") in reruns of The Bold and the Beautiful says more about the negative impact of cultural imperialism than any words could express.

Peter Lewis
A true African-American, Peter has led a peripatetic lifestle, and after graduating from UCF with a film degree, he is pondering life as another wannabe, devoting his time to working on a novel, his thesis film, a suntan and the dubious benefits of Rogaine.