A Touch of Sin: The Portrait Of A Country In Four Strokes

On a mountain road, three axe-wielding thugs stop a lone motorcycle rider. 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. Thus 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 and 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 privatized 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 "privatization is bad". It's smarter than that. Its critique of a vast, uncaring state that does not, cannot 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, the inability of an all-seeing surveillance state to catch a criminal who murders in broad daylight, and a supposedly communist state's inability to protect workers from being exploited, the film paints the short 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 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 pans 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? Do we understand our sin?