Digging for grim life

Li Yang's debut is the kind of film that Ken Loach might have shot in China from a Jim Thompson novel that he had stumbled across. It could hardly be a more devastating contemporary portrait of the country, though this Berlin Film Festival winner reaches beyond its docudrama roots into the realm of the noir nihilism so characteristic of Thompson's pulp fiction.

Shot undercover with actors infiltrating real situations and performing amid real people, the film tells of two lethal conmen, Song (Li Yixiang) and Tang (Wang Shuangbao), who work as miners-for-hire in their region's illegal and unregulated coal mines.

Their scam - which is not revealed until after we have witnessed a shocking and apparently motiveless murder - is to pick up out-of-work young men, have them pose as a relative in order to gain employment in the mines, then claim compensation on behalf of the family following an "accident" below ground. As one of the protagonists says: "Don't work down here if you're afraid of death."

Li's style matches his subject: the blistering white light above ground and the dark, dusty mine shafts lit solely by the helmet lamps reflect the high contrast between the innocent victims and the black-hearted brutality of the villains.

When one of the grifters starts to sympathise with the next potential victim, 16-year-old Yuan (Wang Baoqiang), who wants to make enough money to buy himself back into school, the scam (and the villains' relationship) starts to come adrift. The twisted tale, told with black and bitter humour and robust language, reaches a conclusion of tortured and wholly satisfying irony.

Details of life in contemporary China are subtly accrued: the extensive and crippling unemployment, corrupt mine owners, embezzling party officials and anomalies in the education system all leak through the story like a bloodstain.

Social and economic deprivation reduce some characters to amoral creatures who drift through the dystopian society like mercenaries and bodysnatchers; this is the lawless landscape of the Italian western, of which Li is undoubtedly a fan.

Not surprisingly, his sardonic and cynical view of China has not endeared him to the authorities, who have banned the film and forbidden him to make another in his own country.

Blind Shaft
Cert: cert15