An imperfect ode to the power of cinema
Cinema doesn’t have an easy life in every part of the world and Chinese director Zhang Yimou knows it well: his film One Second was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 2019’s Berlinale and withdrawn shortly before its premiere. The official explanation for what happened says that “technical problems occurred during post-production”, but critics think the film was withdrawn due to censorship in China. There’s for sure a political motivation behind this event: One Second is set during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a time of protests and poverty.
Zhang had to re-shoot many scenes before finalizing the film, but it was completed in 2020 and it debuted yesterday at Rome Film Festival.
One Second is the story of the theft of a newsreel and of two people trying to steal it: orphan Liu (Liu Haocun), a poor girl who needs celluloid to build a lamp for her younger brother, and The Fugitive (Zhang Yi), a man who escaped a labour camp in Gansu aware that his lost daughter appears for one second in that newsreel. Every year, a man called Mr. Film (Fan Wei) tours small cinemas in his area to let people enjoy the emotions of the big screen: he can only show propaganda films and news, but this time there’s a stolen reel that risks not arriving in time for the screening. Liu wants it for necessity, the Fugitive wants to see his daughter. After some adventures to get it back, the reel falls on the ground from a small cart and the film is damaged: every member of the community will help restore the film.
One Second is built on the fights between the Fugitive and Liu: both have their reasons to take possession of the reel, but they don’t understand each other. Also, Zhang focuses on the work that every member of the community does to save the reel and the screening. There are scenes dedicated to the only act of showing a film, where the camera pauses on the details of the projectors. The dialogues are dry and simple, even if Zhang puts some irony the lines of the characters.
The film is well-directed, it has a beautiful cinematography, but there’s something missing in the screenplay and, due to the difficult birth of One Second, we will never know what it is.
What we know is that Zhang’s film is an imperfect, but passionate, love letter to cinema and its redeeming power.
