In February 2020, before the quarantine was declared and the cinemas closed, it premiered Birds of prey, a new chapter in the DC franchise, this time around the villainous Harley Quinn, former girlfriend of the Joker, and the criminal underworld of Gotham City. The movie passed without pain or glory, just another superhero movie (or supervillains, in any case) with third-line characters. There was, however, an oddity to which Hollywood attached great importance: Birds of prey it was the second film of the genre directed by a woman. According to the critics, this explained not only the choice of a female protagonist but the circle of solidarity that was hatched among the women of history, all victims of forms of discrimination, labor abuses or acts of violence perpetrated by men. The director in question was Cathy Yan, a Chinese nationalized American who had a brief stint in journalism and who came from filming her debut film in 2018. A true unknown in the West and a bit also in Asia. Released in 2018, Dead Pigs, his directing debut, could hardly be seen at the Sundance festival and in China: the world premiere is now on the Mubi platform.
Dead Pigs belongs to the genre of choral film, which had its moment of expansion at the beginning of the new millennium with films such as Magnolia, Crash, 21 grams or Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu quickly became a kind of specialist). The structure is known: the story tells several separate stories that at some point intersect through kinships, relationships, objects, and revelations. Cathy Yan arrives at the choral film some time later and understands then that the format has aged and that it must be renewed.
The director has a handful of characters alone or overcome by their problems who soon run into each other: a waiter finds the cell phone of a good-looking girl and falls in love; a town loser is covered with debts that he cannot pay and begs his sister to sell the family home; the sister rejects successive offers from a large corporation that wants to build a housing complex on the site; A young architect works in the corporation who, short of money, agrees to sell products and model in shows for entrepreneurs. The backdrop to these crossover conflicts is Shanghai sometime in 2013, when about sixteen thousand dead pigs appeared in the Huangpu River. The image of a modern, thriving and constantly transforming China, the favorite subject of director Jia Zhang-ke (who serves as executive producer here), finds in the river full of pigs a metaphor for the social decomposition that underlies these changes.
Yan respects the rules imposed by the choral film: as the story unfolds, the characters fall into a spiral of degradation from which they can only emerge transforming themselves, not without terrible sacrifices. But the director is less interested in those punitive cycles than in the human dimension of the protagonists and in the picturesqueness of the story. The Shanghai she films is always exuberant, captivating with bright colors of the day and with the light contrasts of neon at night. The color swap makes one think less about the saturated palettes of Iñárritu’s films than about the festive colorinche of the future Birds of Prey. The world is for Yan a mysterious and fascinating place regardless of the hemisphere or the culture in question.
For this reason, when the moment of punishment and redemption arrives, the film takes sides with a baroque style that eliminates any possible solemnity. The serious comment on life gives way to a lightness that seeps in everywhere and oxygenates the film until it fills it with air and music, as happens during the song at the end, which invites the viewer to happily join an improvised popular choir. A real homeless karaoke.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/dead-pigs-karaoke-for-the-homeless/
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