Recensioni de* critic*

A ceaselessly gorgeous work.

A film of unrelenting visual beauty, only possible with cinematographer Mark Lee's 35mm original (faithfully captured, it's said, in the 4K version now available). Structured like a traditional Chinese scroll painting (which, in turn, allies poetic associated structure with imaginative spacial logic), intensely moving precisely because it bypasses verbal articulation.

Buckling beneath the weight of its director's ambitions, Yang Chao's "Crosscurrent" is spectacular to look at and a devil to decode. Cramming fantasy and mysticism, faith and history into a single riverboat journey, this dirgelike meditation on China's painful economic rebirth dispenses with narrative in favor of semiotics. Virtually everything, and everyone, does double duty as a symbol.

Like many of this year's excellent films about poetry (PATERSON, NERUDA, and A QUIET PASSION), CROSSCURRENT similarly shares lofty ambitions in tying verse to the image as a means of articulating the ways that we relate to the world around us.

The Jury short-changed a third, Crosscurrent, which merely won the incomparable Mark Lee/Lǐ Píngbīn an Outstanding Artistic Contribution Silver Bear for camerawork—an award that reduced Yáng Chāo's broody, moody, but decidedly brainy prose poem on the destiny of PR China to a series of pretty pictures.

The iconography of Crosscurrent remains powerful despite its tenuous symbolic journey. The film pulls from the evocations of an earlier cinema, that of the first half of the 20th century, when means of transport around urban centers—trains, buses, and boats—were the focal point for motion pictures of equal parts social realism and more lyrical or comic impulses.

Mainland helmer-scribe Yang Chao's film cruises along with a ship's captain who has sex with the same woman at various ports, which is meant to symbolize the river's nurturing yet mutable relationship with humanity (chauvinistically envisioned here as male). Plotless, pretentiously literary and lousy at explaining geography, the movie fails to put Yang's vision into a fictional framework that's even remotely engaging.

What I'm absolutely sure of is that well over half of Crosscurrent, essentially an anthology of cinematic poems, flew right over me. These place names, the ghost stories and rituals, especially once we reach the controversial Three Gorges Dam, will likely resonate with Chinese audiences in ways that I, in my ignorance, cannot understand. Even so, Crosscurrent is enchanting, as is—no surprise here—the cinematography of Mark Lee Ping-Bin.