Putting Life in Context
Chen Kaige composes a sweeping digital-age epic with Caught in the Web
Unlike The Social Network, which burnished the legend of Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook while glamourizing the derangement of social values and personal relationships, Chen Kaige gets directly to the social, spiritual point in his masterly new film Caught in the Web.
Chen balances a multi-character story involving an executive secretary Ye Lanqiu (Yuanyuan Gao) who is objectified by a cell phone camera capture of a complex private moment that gets broadcast over the Internet. The stress this causes in the lives of her boss Shen (Xueqi Wang) and his wife Mo (Chen Hong) extends to the relations of TV journalist Ruoxi (Chen Yao) who exploits the clip; Rouxi's charming lover, Yan Souchang (Mark Chao) and the cousin she mentors, Jiaqi (May Wang) are entangled in Chen's ingenious narrative lattice.
Caught in the Web moves swiftly, like farce, yet Ye's personal crisis--the media heartlessly mocks her as Sunglasses Girl--reflects a serious turning point in national, global morality. As Chen interweaves all the characters, their physical interactions clearly show how technology effects our spiritual lives: phantom antagonisms and emotional confusions are exacerbated by the overwhelming tendency to let technology replace actual connection and interactions.
Several kinds of love story are adroitly revealed: Ye's loneliness is answered by complicated by Souchang's ardent restlessness, her boss Shen's marriage is exposed as a mismatch of longings that go back to its beginning, and Ruoxi's media hotshot ambitions mask a desperation that, like everyone's, is tied to social and economic insecurity. The human texture of these conflicts--through the most subtle, vibrant, funny and moving performances of any film this year--makes Caught in the Web more than a social screed. It satirizes the excesses of digital-era chaos ("Only the mentally ill tell the truth these days") yet Chen respects the gravity of his characters' turmoil. (Money is this film's Maguffin--the thing the characters care about while Chen takes us deeper.)
In Jia Zhangke's poisonous, overrated A Touch of Sin, China's moral distress was used as an occasion to indulge the violent, nihilistic catastrophes favored among Festival Circuit cynics. By equating national chaos with kung-fu movie brutality, Jia Zhangke continued his usual facile, sophomoric political perspective. That this cynicism prevails in the culture might explain why Caught in the Web, which sweeps its characters along, like a game of chess played at Internet speed, has not been widely hailed.
But breakthroughs are hard to calibrate. I can't think of any other movie that so clearly captures how the media--journalism and the Internet-- takes life out of context. The world attacks Ye's moment of infamy (her outward frustration masks despair and hidden desire) while her boss secretly observes "She has character." This disjuncture reveals an almost sinister, Frtiz Langian social network--what Brian DePalma's Redacted meant to be-a heartbreaking examination of how technology distances and confuses human response.
"Our job is to record the face of the truth, but sometimes the truth is puzzling," is Ruoxi's callous self-justification but it also inspires Chen's humane investigation. His essentially romantic style goes contrary to David Fincher and Jia Zhangke's chic, pessimism about how both digital media and television and rampant capitalism ruinously intervenes with our personal communication, eventually anesthetizing and distancing our spiritual anxieties. Chen's vision of this reality is as bold as Renoir's Rules of the Game was in its day. Against the self-importance of The Social Network and A Touch of Sin, Caught in the Web's style is deceptively light; the shift in consciousness among digital era "Netizens" is an on-the-wing social observation but profoundly humane, summed up by Shen's heartfelt lament: "Why put such a vulgar spin on a noble act." Chen summarizes our global and cinematic condition.
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