Review of A Touch of Sin / 天注定, directed by Jia Zhangke

As someone who now studies culture and international politics as a graduate student, I always say China and its culture was my first love.

When I was a seventh grader in middle school, I took Mandarin Chinese to prove a point (I overheard some kids saying that the smart kids took Chinese, and I wanted to be perceived that way), and that completely changed my life.

It led me to study international trade in college, study abroad on a prestigious government scholarship to Korea, and now I’ve studied Mandarin for over ten years. It’s wild to me how one decision led to a ripple effect.

When I was a freshman in college,I decided to take a Contemporary Chinese Cinema course through my school’s honors program, and that was the first time I had formally studied Chinese film.

I envision an alternate life where I became a China scholar, but instead now I do South Asian and Korean studies mainly, and in this other life I would’ve voraciously consumed Chinese cinema. A Touch of Sin was one of many incredible movies we watched in that class, and it instilled a love in me for Chinese cinema as a whole.

Let’s get into the review then!

Four stories about those who have been left behind by contemporary Chinese society.

This is a movie split into multiple moving parts, but we begin with the character San’er, who we’re going to meet again in the second story.

He’s going throughout rural Shanxi on his motorbike when three guys try to stop him and take everything he has on his person. This is where we learn San’er really doesn’t care, as he straight up pulls out a pistol and kills all three of the guys with it before continuing on his way.

We then pivot to the next story, which is set in Shanxi. The main character here is Dahai, who works at a coal mine and is the union representative for the workers there.

He, and many others, have realized the village is poor while the corrupt officials continue to line their pockets, but when he confronts the chief of the village, he just kind of waves him off. Dahai wanders through town, letting people know he plans on going to the Beijing office, but when he finds himself in front of the mine owners, they set their thugs loose on him.

Dahai then isn’t taken seriously anymore, and then, while in the hospital, they try to bribe him in exchange for silence. Dahai is even more pissed off, takes a gun from his house, and then goes to the village accountant.

He shoots the guy and his wife, then continues his way through the town and shoots anyone involved with this, including the village chief, and he sits in his car as the cop cars starting approaching the town.

The next story is San’er, who’s in Chongqing. That’s where his mother, estranged wife, and son live, but his wife doesn’t want San’er’s money.

It’s the Chinese New Year and he spends his time with his son, bonding by shooting his pistol in the midst of a fireworks show. We already know he’s kind of a wanderer, and after that he buys three bus tickets for random cities, and then he leaves town. We learn he makes his income by killing people, as he shoots a woman and her husband and steals their bags, fleeing town before anyone can stop him.

We meet Xiaoyu in Hubei next. She’s engaging in an affair with a married man, and has just told him that he needs to divorce his wife or it’s over.

They part ways, and Xiaoyu goes to her receptionist gig at a spa, where she is attacked by thugs hired by the wife. She escapes, then heads off to where her mother lives.

But as she’s coming home from her mother’s, she spots some officials beating up a poor worker who didn’t pay a toll, and when she spots them at her shift that night, she ends up killing one of them with a fruit knife. Shocked at what she just did, she calls the police on herself.

Our final story takes place in Guangdong, where a young man named Xiaohui is working in a factory. When he injures someone by accident, he flees his factory and finds work as a hostess club, and he meets a woman there that he fancies already: Lianrong.

The two get cozy, but she ends up rejecting his romantic pursuits formally, as she has a daughter at home and does sex work just to get an income in the house. Xiaohui quits after seeing her do her job, then takes on another factory job. As the guy from the other factory finds him there, Xiaohui, kills himself by jumping out of his apartment given to him by the company.

The movie ends with Xiaoyu interviewing for a factory, and as she stumbles across an opera performance, they ask the audience, “Do you understand your sin?”

Overall Thoughts

This is such a loaded, visually gorgeous movie, but it certainly is worth the journey these stories take you through. Each one of them is based on a true case that happened in China in the twenty-first century, which makes what’s happening on the screen even more shocking.

I only knew about the Foxconn factory suicides going into this, which is what Xiaohui’s story is based around, but the other events were really interesting to learn about after the fact.

Jia Zhangke movies are like visual poetry to me, and I think everyone who’s interested in film should watch one of his movies at least once. I think this is one of his finer more recent movies though, that’s for sure.

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