A Touch of Sin Is Portrait of a Country in Four Strokes

On a mountain road, three ax-wielding thugs stop a lone motorcycle rider, but as we brace ourselves for the attack, the rider pulls out a pistol and shoots the first thug, then the second. The third one runs for his life. Just as we're feeling the rush of watching the underdog turn the tables, the rider shoots the fleeing thug in the back. He's expressionless, if anything, he's bored. So, begins the unique action revenge film A Touch of Sin.

Directed by Jia Zhangke, this 2013 Chinese film tells the stories of four people, in four different Chinese provinces, whose lives are poised at the edge of an abyss. They stare deep into it, and the eyes that stare back are of corruption, psychopathy, sexual violence, exploitation, depression, all ultimately borne of a system that works only for the rich and powerful. Jia Zhangke's films have always had trouble with the Chinese censors and it's clear why. The problems characters face in A Touch of Sin are all drawn from famous real-life incidents in China.

From the very first story of Dahai, a worker in a coal mine that was recently privatised, trying to get its new owners and the state to pay the workers their fair share of the profit, Jia Zhangke draws a straight line from corruption in the state to violence on the ground. At the same time that the movie critiques the corruption among regional officials, it also points a subtle finger at the central government. Dahai believes Beijing will uphold workers' rights once they find out about the exploitation and embezzlement at the mine. But there is no way for him to inform the central government of the corruption at the coal mine. What use are rights if there is no way to exercise them?

The film's message, if it can be reduced to something so one-dimensional, isn't as simplistic as "privatisation is bad". It's smarter than that. Its critique of a vast, uncaring state that does not — can not— see the lives of the people it's supposed to govern is applicable regardless of whatever economic system it espouses. In its portrayal of the nexus of politics and money, of the inability of an all-seeing surveillance state to catch a criminal who murders in broad daylight, of a supposedly communist state's inability to protect workers from being exploited, the film paints in high contrast the shortness of the distance to decadence in a society where power is unchecked, money denotes worth, and rights are just ink on paper.

All politics and themes aside, A Touch of Sin is one hell of a ride. Though the action scenes are far and few in between, the bursts of violence are as shocking and cinematic as any Gun Fu action film. The writing, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, takes us so deep into the psyches of these characters that the short period of their life that we see speaks for an entire lifetime. It manages to wring out moments of genuine humanity in sequences where a father bonds with his young son by shooting his gun in place of setting off fireworks, or when someone seeking revenge on one of our heroes doesn't have the cruelty to go through with it. None of the stories pan out the way we expect. Narrative rules and the three-act structure are thrown out the window in the prologue. By the end, the experience we're left with is closer to that of reading a novel than watching a two-hour film.

The movie shows us four stories full of violence and exploitation, then leaves us with a question: Do you understand your sin? When we see perpetrators of violence and victims of exploitation, are we missing the forest for the trees? These small self-contained tales of revenge take place within a vast system that traps victims and perpetrators alike. In fact, it makes victims into violent outlaws by systematically taking away all other roads to justice, then watches coldly as they walk down the one path available to them only to punish them for taking that path.

A Touch of Sin may be set in a far off land, and tell stories of people who differ from us by ethnicity, language, and culture, but in these characters we see ourselves and in their struggles we see our lives and the lives of the people around us remixed and painted in slightly different hues. In whatever way we may differ, we'll always find kinship in the struggle.