I saw an excellent Chinese movie last night that, among other virtues, uses tea drinking and preparation dramatically to suggest character.
_South of the Clouds_ doesn't seem to have an American distributor, and I've no idea where else it can be seen normally in a theater, except of course in China. I saw it at a sort of film festival called New Directors / New Films at Lincoln Center in New York.
The main character is a 61-year-old recently retired man living in a northern city, a widower with three children. It becomes clear that he has regrets about the life he's lived there for decades. For reasons that aren't understood until later but are clearly important to him, he takes a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yunnan, where the second half of the film takes place. (The title of the movie is an echo of the word "Yunnan".)
The main character is seen in the first part drinking from a drab lidded mug, and it accentuates the mild anhedonia of his life in the north. In the Yunnan part, where, for reasons I won't explain, he becomes mixed up with the law, he meets two tea drinking cops:
- a lazy, crude middle-ranking officer, who drinks a fairly dark tea (cooked Puerh, maybe?) from a screw-top glass jar;
- a philosophical police chief, ruefully aware of the bureaucratic limits on his ability achieve justice, who makes tea gongfu style with a yixing setup.
Does Zhu Wen, this movie's writer/director, think there's a Chinese audience these days who are alive enough to tea culture to notice these things? Or did he apply these tea touches just for himself?
/Lew