Yes, there are moments of calm in the beginning. A flight over a rugged mountain massif, a car ride over a bridge so high that it seems to end up with the gods. Instead, it leads into a tunnel that people have been building for ten years to complete the state expressway for trains. The work is nearing completion, there is only one kilometer to go before the breakthrough. This establishes the topic: engineering skill in a hostile environment.
Unfortunately, the mountain is making a fuss, the earth is shaking, water is breaking through a rock face and flooding the tunnel, so the workers have to dive to blast open a drain. In the screaming that follows, the title appears in the picture, it’s minute four of the Chinese disaster film “Cloudy Mountain”.
It will continue at this pace. You quickly get to know the main characters, each with potential for conflict: Ms. Ding, the site manager, who has to justify herself to the party and the workers at the same time. Young engineer Yizhou and his geologist friend Xiaojin, both tasked with predicting the mountain’s behavior. Yizhou’s father came to visit, he too was an engineer, a “railway pioneer” from earlier times.
The railway pioneer and his son are not particularly fond of each other. The old-fashioned father doesn’t think much of new technology, there is a dispute over competence between him and Yizhou, basically it’s always about the question of which of the two is brave enough to take on responsibility. The answer to this, however, is the task of the whole film, which will show with a good deal of kitsch that actually anyone can do it on this construction site: Solidarity awakens in danger, regardless of the pressure from project management or financiers.
But most of the time too much is happening for such considerations, the mountain is getting angrier. The ground is ripping open, several peaks are shaking, falling rocks, landslides, new floods, it also hits the unprepared population in the area, because there is a colorful city here with a workers’ settlement. All of this is threatened with annihilation unless the heroes find a way out.
Hollywood hides patriotism behind jokes – the Chinese tend not to
The film, in turn, drives these heroes apart so that it can better appreciate the individual heroic deed. The father dives through subterranean caves with helpless civilians, the son climbs headfirst without a rope over vertical cliffs, his girlfriend looks after scattered children, and Ms. Ding boosts morale.
The mechanics of the action thriller are still maintained. The various levels interact precisely because each is admirably exaggerated on its own. If you really want to address credibility, you can use the comparison with Hollywood.
If a US action hero like John Wick, possibly armed only with a bad haircut and a dog leash, can incapacitate masses of opponents, why shouldn’t a Chinese action hero be able to free climb or free dive? The Chinese are in the lead there, even if they always accompany their actions with patriotism. Which, by the way, happens the same way in US cinema, only better hidden behind jokes.
Jun Lee, the director of “Cloudy Mountain”, relies on great melodrama despite all the turbulence. Deep in the mountain, he stages love, despair and tragedy in the light of powerful flashlights. Although the pathos often slips into the comic towards the end, on the other hand it is of course a question of perception. When women resolutely ignore their careers, when men sacrifice their life’s work after ten years of scoundrels, when everyone first cries and then sings, then instead of mocking, one could just as well sing along – because one knows that one is watching pure, foreign entertainment cinema.
Feng Bao, China 2021. Director: Jun Lee. Starring Zhu Yilong, Huang Zhizhong, and Jiao Junyan. Plaion Pictures, 116 minutes. Theatrical release: December 1st, 2022.