L'orphelin d'Anyang

This film as a dense, knotty little piece of poetry, clocking in at under 80 minutes with not an inch of fat on it. Wang deftly orchestrates single-take master-shots to keep our viewing at a distance. But, unlike other practitioners of the master-shot school -- filmmakers I admire in their own right, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhang-ke -- Wang uses the stationary camera and long take to create slightly more obvious black comedy, like an episode of "The Carol Burnett Show" as directed by Samuel Beckett. In particular, Wang's use of the quick fade is excellent. Often, he'll go to blackout just as some funny or shocking occurrence becomes legible. I may be making this sound like "difficult viewing," but really, it struck me as a 6th-Generation Chinese stab at a Jarmusch film, and as such, it's utterly accessible. Here's hoping it gets picked up for U.S. distribution. It might prove to be a minor hit.