What is old and new anyway? The story of 20th century China seems driven by a search for the answer. A New Old Play (Original Title: Jiao Ma Tang Hui) (2021), directed by Qiu Jiongjiong, in Mandarian with English subtitles, brings a welcome, over-it perspective to this nation-building history with a skit-filled experience from the ground level of a Sichuan opera troupe called the “New-New Troupe”. Early on, the troupe founder, an official named Pocky for his recognizable pockmarks, is approached by three authoritative peers in a teahouse about starting the troupe, and they propose this amusing name. They argue even the Confucian classics say, “Renew daily.” What comprises a new-new theater? More women’s roles. More modern stories. “Modern is better. Modern is best,” Pocky says, using the English word for modern, a small nod to the global forces at play. By the film/play’s end, the twisty paths that the lives of the troupe members take leaves the audience with both a weighty sense of loss from relentless political upheaval and a quiet awe for the resilience of people and communities to adapt with grace.
Courtesy of Icarus Films
Courtesy of Icarus Films
How does this epic three-hour film pull off this lightness? Perhaps it’s no surprise that a film about Chinese regional opera would have many theatrical, constructed qualities. Planimetric compositions, popularized by Wes Anderson, that play on lined-up stagings one associates with theater, are the film’s preferred mode. And director Qiu Jiongjiong brings a few other art sensibilities to his first fiction film. As a renowned contemporary painter, Qiu brings stunningly textured painted surfaces to his sets. Most strikingly, the film keeps returning to a creepy, expressionistic fresco painting of a clown figure that seems somewhere between opera character and symbol of denounced artists during the Cultural Revolution. Also, Qiu’s documentary training from his involvement in the 2000s digital-video independent cinema movement pays off in his focus on small everyday ways of being for these troupe members–of eating, washing, using the toilet, socializing within and between genders, of mentorship between teachers and students.
Courtesy of Icarus Films
Mixing naturalism and artifice is apiece with the film’s underlying theme and framing device, the spiritual connection between the living and the dead. At the film’s misty blue opening, we are actually in an underworld limbo, where undertaker demons Oxhead and Horseface, two eccentric burnout types riding a rickshaw with Christmas lights, are trying to escort the main character, Qiu, to hell. Qiu is the director Qiu Jiongjiong’s grandfather, who, in another karmically fitting creative choice, is also played by the director. We learn from painterly intertitles of two origin stories–the troupe’s founder, Pocky, is an opera fan who saves a general during the warlord era of the 1920s and rises to higher office, while Qiu is an orphan, who takes shelter with the troupe and eventually trains with them. Playing with a loose chronology, A New Old Play brings with it all the wistfulness of clashing past and present, as we proceed through Qiu’s life story with the troupe from beyond the grave.
Sweeping history is given the abstraction of a shot of soldiers with bayonets in silhouette ascending and descending stairs, and even one intertitle admits that the politics are murky. At times, the film recalls the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness in its approach to the specter of political violence. It also recalls Hou’s other film The Puppetmaster, which literally documents and dramatizes the oral history of a successful hand puppet performer, who works with the propagandistic agendas of one regime after another. Maybe it’s appropriate then that a grown-up Qiu speculates with his wife on traveling to Taiwan during the confusion of the Chinese Civil War. At times, the movie frustrates with its excessive ellipses and random surrealism.
All the more refreshing, then, is how this opera troupe’s experience of these times puts the disruptive catharsis of theater for society, center-stage. During war with Japan, the Nationalist-pushed patriotic operas have such incendiary propaganda that they incite a riot on the stage, that soldiers ironically have to clamp down on. (Resemblances to Euphoria or the Oscars, anyone?) Later, during the Cultural Revolution, a bleak time for artists, Qiu, forced to stand public scrutiny with a dunce cap, can’t help but entertain gawking children with his clown mugging.
The tale comes into focus as Qiu builds a life with his wife, an even more successful opera performer from an early age. We see them first in an opium den, reflecting on each other’s wartime growing-up experiences. Then, during the early years of the PRC, they are paraded as recovering addicts for an anti-opium campaign. Qiu can’t help but call out others in the theater community for also using, but Qiu’s wife quells him. It’s a mature futility that she pulls out again late in the story, when she is forced to make accusations against her husband’s character, and obliges with the consummate professionalism of, well, an actor. Her character’s arc–bitter, but dignified–carries the pained heart of the film, especially as their son soon comes of age, impetuously eager to join the happening Red Guards.
Courtesy of Icarus Films
While the proceedings add up to a seething anger over the helplessness of people to the onslaught of political progress, it’s nonetheless the magic of Qiu Jiongjiong’s sensibility that the film always stays a little playful, bordering on reckless. As a young Qiu tells Pocky in a memorably cute direct-to-camera monologue, after admitting to hiding out with the troupe, “Lock me up or shoot me, old man. It’s up to you. But if I lied, I wouldn’t be my parents’ son!” It’s the prerogative of the performing artist, Qiu seems to say, to skirt the social norms.
It’s also no small feat that the film turns a harrowing scene about surviving starvation conditions involving human waste into a comedy where Qiu and his wife’s esteem as opera performers again saves them from punishment. With memorable setpieces like this, Qiu Jiongjiong’s first fiction film gamely entertains, while also creating some speechlessly, achingly sublime passages in its misty limbo space of cheery greetings that occur between the various troupe members, long passed, who still lovingly pat each other and say, see you next time, as if no time has passed. As ultimately a family history, A New Old Play is a generously personal experience that seems magical for cinema to pull off.
A New Old Play opens on May 20 at Anthology Film Archives, followed by cities across the U.S. and Canada.
Alex Ho is Professor of Chinese Culture and Heritage, Asian American History, and Asian American Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Follow Alex @alexjho88 and Asian Glow blog
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