Beijing Taxi

A week or so ago, I went to a screening of Beijing Taxi, a new film by young Beijing documentary-maker Wang Miao.

It's a diverting study of the lives of three taxi drivers in the capital over the two or three years leading up to the 2008 Olympics. In fact, though, it's not much focused on the business of driving taxis at all (I think there's a great documentary still to be made just following what happens in the cars): the film aims for a broader scope by concentrating more on the private lives of its three subjects. Also, interestingly enough, of this central trio, one takes a better-paid job driving tour buses, and another decides to try her hand at running a market stall instead - leaving only one, the oldest, to struggle on with his taxi-driving, despite health problems which threaten to lose him his cab.

I fear most expat Beijing residents will have felt a little disappointed, as I was, that there wasn't more of the city on view here, and that there wasn't more insight into what Beijingers actually think of living here. The only really striking comment in the whole film was the female driver-turned-entrepreneur's complaint that the Olympics were lousy for business in 2008.

This project looks to have been very well-funded, and the technical crew were mostly foreigners. Thus, the production values were much higher than we've come to expect from the majority of Chinese documentaries, which tend to be mostly ultra-low budget 'underground' projects - often shot single-handedly by impassioned 'amateurs' rather than full film crews. The photography here was gorgeous, and the editing very slick indeed.

However, the classic vices of the typical Chinese documentary were all still there - unfortunately.

Chinese documentary-makers seem to hate to editorialize at all. They just like to present an unmediated slice-of-life. This means that a lot of very inconsequential scenes will be included to enhance this conceit of 'realism', and often left to play out in real time - with few if any cuts. I saw a film about the police in a northern border town a few years ago, where a suspect was made to support himself against a wall for ten minutes with his legs slightly bent at the knee (a softening up exercise, prior to interrogation): a Western film-maker would have cut to a clock to show the passage of time, and just shown a few short passages of the prisoner's discomfort to make the point; this Chinese director showed the whole ten minutes (nothing happened - except that the prisoner, predictably, stood up to rest himself every time the officer supervising him left the room). Such longueurs, alas, are inescapable in a Chinese documentary.

It doesn't help that you have no idea how long you're going to have to endure such plodding exposition. I sat through nearly an hour-and-a-half of Beijing Taxi - 90 minutes that felt more like 3 or 4 hours - and it showed no sign of approaching a close. The running time had not been announced by the organisers of the screening. It isn't even listed on the film's IMDB page. Perhaps there's an unwritten pact between Chinese documentary-makers that they should never advertise the length of their films - for fear that potential viewers might be discouraged. I suspect Beijing Taxi, a film that has obviously been made with an overseas audience in mind, probably runs somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. That would make it a relative lightweight in the field of Chinese documentaries, where most run well over 2 hours, and some 3 hours or 4 hours or even more.

And you have little sense of when the end - and your release from your rock-hard chair - might be approaching, because there is no structure. None whatsoever. Well, that would be 'editorializing', wouldn't it? Although there's a similar problem in most Chinese feature films, too: in this country they seem to have never developed the concept of narrative drive, of stories shaped by the developmental character arc of the protagonist(s). A story is just "a bunch of stuff that happens". And then it stops happening. THE END. I fear most of their classic literature is much the same. Aristotle's insights are sorely missed.

There's never any voiceover narration, either. And little or no captioning. You're just left to make your own sense of the pictures and the recorded dialogue presented to you. Up to a point, this can be quite a refreshing change from the heavily structured documentary style we're familiar with in the West. And I can see that this approach might work well with certain kinds of subject. But I think it would have to be allied with more selectivity and self-discipline in the use of footage, and much shorter running times. I would like to charitably suppose that Chinese documentarians opt for this excessively spare, unobtrusive, 'selfless' style out of some kind of ideology; but I suspect, in fact, they're just lazy, naive, or uneducated. If they watched something like Fourteen Days In May or Bloody Ivory or A State Of Mind, they would see how an only slightly more intrusive 'editorial stance' can render a documentary so much more compelling, and sustain audience interest even at full feature-length - rather than creating films that are, whatever the potential appeal of their subject matter, little more than a penance to sit through.