Something to watch tonight: Thursday 13 February

Cliff Walkers (Zhang, 2021)

It’s turning into “Spy Week” here at F&S, as we showcase another title filled with double-agents, traitors and moles.

Boutique Australian physical media label Imprint recently launched a sub-brand called Imprint Asia in which they showcase hard-to-find content from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Some are older (Takeshi Kitano’s 2003 reboot of Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman) and some are very recent (the 2023 sequel to the Chinese smash hit, The Wandering Earth II).

Cliff Walkers was an absolute smash in China, winning the Golden Rooster (the domestic Best Picture award) and becoming the Chinese nominee for the Best International Feature Oscar.

It’s directed by legendary filmmaker Zhang Yimou, a festival fave from the days of Red Sorghum (1988), Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) but who has more recently used his elder statesman status to make some absolute blockbusters – Shadow (2019) was “a stylish and operatic martial arts epic” according to this critic.

In Cliff Walkers, a quartet of Chinese Communist Party agents parachutes into the puppet state of Manchukuo, controlled by Japan after they invaded in 1931. It’s where The Last Emperor, Pu Yi, was nominally head of state and it’s a fascinating place at a fascinating time in history.

The spies are on a mission to find evidence of, and subsequently reveal, details of Japanese atrocities in the region but they soon discover that there are double-agents and traitors everywhere.

They make it to the city of Harbin where I had to pause for a moment so I could learn why all the signage was in Chinese and Russian. It turns out that Harbin was on the main train line between China and Russia and therefore a major trade route. Our heroes have been trained for this mission for years by the Soviet Union but, clearly, they would not have made it into the territory the traditional way.

This is a big budget, handsomely put together, action and intrigue epic. I found it hard to keep up with who was who and who was on what side – characters would be in street clothes working for the resistance one minute and in full uniform at security headquarters the next – but that confusion and mystery mirrors how the characters must have been feeling.

This is such a powerfully evocative period in Chinese history, and a story of these “heroes of the revolution” is certainly one that meets with the approval of the CCP régime, but the action is expertly choreographed and the snowy production values are out of sight.