“As a common intellectual, I feel responsible to show the reality of my country and its contradictions – especially the tribulations of people,” declares Beijing film director Wang Chao. Tribulations aside, Wang’s third film, Luxury Car (LC), is not just another bleak social-realist take on modern China. This last entry in Wang’s thought-provoking trilogy (The Orphan of Anyang; Night and Day) won the ‘Prix Un Certain Regard – Fondation Gan’ at Cannes this May. And deservedly so: Luxury Car is Wang’s most personal work, inspired by his own tribulations. As such, it concerns failure, fatalism and the absurdity of the human condition, all of which have been at the heart of his triptych. This film, however, goes deeper; it is dedicated to his family, and to a wider extent, all Chinese parents.

“I’m the unworthy son of wonderful parents,” says the 42-year-old, Nanjing-born filmmaker as if he needed to justify his motive for making the film. Like many a modern Chinese youth, Wang left home for the big city to study, and eventually further his career. Typically, he now looks back upon his roots with sentimentality. In the early 1990s, he entered Beijing Film Academy, later working as an assistant to Chen Kaige, and he’s since made the capital his base for his own successful films. In the meantime, though, he neglected his parents, visiting them just twice in a decade. Sadly, in 2005, he became aware that his mother had terminal cancer; indeed, that she had been under treatment for some time. Wang’s relatives had concealed her illness from him so as not to distract him from his work. To Wang’s regret. In a society where “families suffer the negative effects of distance, setbacks and the inability to help each other”, he feels that fundamental values have been lost.

Which goes a long way in explaining why family miscommunication is a central theme in his latest film. Luxury Car, a Sino/French co-production tells the story of a retired country teacher who comes to Wuhan to look for his son. With the help of his daughter, a prostitute, he tries to fulfill his wife’s last wish (she is terminally ill), which is to see her son one last time. What follows is a moving exploration of the generation gap, and the erosion of traditional family values. In the modern world, it seems anything and everything is subject to market forces, even the members of one’s own family. As such, the film is an apologia, an attempt by Wang to make amends for all the years he dedicated to his own advancement at the expense of his family. In other words, this work articulates the director’s need for atonement, in a world where, as he puts it, “progress also means there’s a cruel price to pay”.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
July 2006 issue