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Lauded for the stylized studio environments of his debut fiction feature, 2021’s Locarno prizewinner “A New Old Play,” Qiu Jiongjiong returns to the soundstage for a second helping in his follow-up, “Fuxi: Four Tales
of Feasting.” “A New Old Play” told the story of an actor who played different roles in successive epochs of Chinese history, and made his life into a three-hour pageant by using stage techniques: rippling bedsheets dyed a watery blue for ocean waves; fake plastic trees for nature. “Fuxi” has no such neat thematic relation between subject and style, but it’s a joy to be back on the soundstage with Qiu regardless.
Now acting as his own production designer as well, writer-director-editor Qiu serves up more painted backdrops and practical theatrical effects, this time in an anthology film in which a cast toplined by Lee Kang-sheng play multiple roles in rhyming chapters centered around food. It’s a four-course feast for the eyes, even if “A New Old Play’s” intertwined themes of art, memory, and China’s tumultuous 20th century offered more food for thought.
“Fuxi” — a word translated by an opening title card as “a tasty delicacy, or the act of eating it” — circles ideas of ritual and community, embodied by tasty-looking Sichuan food and, at times, fairly detailed instructions for cooking it. The appeal to arthouse audiences is obvious, though the international critics and programmers who compared “A New Old Play” to Jia Zhangke’s politically ambitious “Platform” may find “Fuxi” less substantial. Qiu operates in a more folkloric mode, beginning with the film’s first segment, “The Ancestors’ Fuxi,” set among a prehistoric tribe whose members are recognizably human, except for their tails. As a member of the tribe approaches the end of her life, it is explained, she cuts off her own tail, and prepares it as a soup, to feed her descendants as part of her burial rites.
The dying granny, who chops away at her appendage with a prop hatchet, is played by Lee, sporting a silver wig seemingly fashioned of rope. Famous as Tsai Ming-liang’s longtime muse, Lee has a sly charisma that peeks out at the edges of even his most morose roles, as it does here. Lee reappears as another female elder in “The King’s Fuxi,” which jumps ahead by at least one millennium — people no longer have tails, and their diet has diversified. There’s agriculture now — villagers toil behind tiered hillsides fashioned from flat boards painted with abstract green swirls — and animal husbandry.
In the “Ancestors” segment, wild dogs, played by actors in masks and black unitards, howl on the village outskirts; by the second segment, they’re kept as pets, and one (voiced by Qiu himself) even narrates the story. Society has become more hierarchical: The food Lee’s character serves is an offering to her king, who has abdicated in order to live as a bird (he floats through hand-painted clouds and smoke-machine haze on digitally removed wires), but still returns once a year to taste the tribute of his subjects.
This king is based on Duyu, a figure from Sichuan legend (“Duyu” means “cuckoo”), and one who may be inspired by a real figure who introduced the core principles of farming to the region. But even as “Fuxi” moves into recorded history, it remains in a liminal space between textbook and myth, material world and spirit world. In the third, most substantial segment, “The Litterateur’s Fuxi,” four spirits — including one played by Xue Xuchun, who portrayed a similar underworld guide in “A New Old Play” — assemble in a 1997 represented by cutouts of skyscrapers backlit through lighting-gel windows. They’re gathering to share a festive banquet at which each course triggers a memory from the life of the Song dynasty dissident poet Su Dongpo (Lee Hong-chi); amid the artifice of Qiu’s mise-en-scène, overhead shots of pork belly browning on a bubbling skillet, or fish steaming in chilis, stand out for their earthiness, and the use of offcuts such as a lamb’s spine makes a stark commentary on the pains of exile.
If “Fuxi” has a political agenda, it’s to be found in this section’s look at the responsibilities of an artist, though the fourth section, “Sworn Brothers’ Fuxi,” set at the dawn of the 20th century, is much more typical in its oblique and disguised musings on the promises and disappointments of modernity. A boy (Zhou Jiarui, one of the great-grandsons in “The Ancestors’ Fuxi”) runs away from servitude in a kitchen and, pursued by officers of the dying Qing dynasty, falls in with three of the spirits from the previous chapter, a motley gang of outlaws or ghosts who teach him to make congee, and about the virtues it requires — patience when preparing a meal, camaraderie when sharing it. The film’s overarching philosophy, as summed up in its final sequences, is stoic, bawdy and not particularly deep: “We eat, we shit, and that’s it, as of old.”
Freedom, for Qiu, seems to mean the freedom, in his storytelling, to repeatedly cross borders between life and death, and between different layers of fiction. “Fuxi” has a frame story, but it’s hard to tell where the frame ends and the story begins: Sol (Wen Ke) and Luna (Xiao Luxi), wearing respective sun and moon headpieces, look down on the feasting mortals, occasionally falling to earth but also appearing in interstitial sequences tinted, like a silent movie, either sepia or steel-blue, in which a film crew preps the Fuxi sequences.
In a recurring image, Sol and Luna seesaw on a foam mountain, rising and falling in turn as the days and centuries flow by below. Qiu’s eloquence lies in such playful gestures, which are pleasurable for their own sake. “Fuxi” takes place on sets with the heightened artificiality of a Hollywood backlot; Qiu’s handcraft is so sumptuous and elaborate that “resourceful” doesn’t cover it. In an era when digital effects work — and, increasingly, gen-AI imagery — is used as a quick fix for corner-cutting productions at all budget levels, every one of “Fuxi’s” intricately wrought tactile flourishes is a luxury good.
