Back to Back, Face to Face

Wang Shuangli is deputy director of a provincial cultural centre and expects to be made director. The post does not come to him; Old Ma is brought in from the countryside and installed instead. Wang does not pick an open fight. He uses the rules of the bureaucracy itself: reports, signatures, a well-placed rumour, a complaint filed at the right moment. One director goes, another arrives, and Wang is still sitting in the same office. At two and a half hours, the film is counted among the sharpest looks Chinese cinema of the nineties took at the world of posts and officials. Yang Yazhou shows no villain; everyone is protecting a position, which is exactly why the system works. Wang's life at home, the expectation of a son and the relationship with his father, stands as the same hierarchy in miniature. Nobody wins and nobody is punished; the turn simply passes on.