Mr. Tree

I saw this film as part of the Rotterdam Film Festival 2012. The announcement text on the festival website sounded intriguing, covering urbanization of Chinese villages, whether they want it or not.

However, the net result on screen had zero political contents. It is just some not-so-interesting story about someone not-so-interesting with his family and friends.

I badly missed information about their environment (in two senses of the word). And it has also nothing that looks like a documentary about China and the people that live there.

As far as I'm concerned, this film is unnecessary.

I watched this movie due to listening some chinese folk music. Although many elderly srill stay in chinese village,most of young people choose to leave village. The character in this movie, "shu",is a rare young people who choose to stay in village. Becuase of his lack of ability and his psychosis. There are many shu's fantasies in this film. It not only show the needy and pathetic life about shu, but also show the contradiction of villagers. Villagers help each other but also slander each other because of the unique chinese society. If viewers has experienced of living in chinese village, they can recognize this movie better.

Not satisfying in terms of storytelling, especially the first half. But once you've endured the first 40 dull minutes, things begin to make sense as you put the pieces together and understand how Mr. Shu becomes the village fool. You'd recognise him only if you've known true poverty and in those hopeless yet hopeful rural villages, not the "poverty" with food stamps and MaDonald's.

In this movie, Mr tree get the mental illness called schizophrenia which many of its symptoms are mentioned in detail in the film. No matter in the story or the actors's , especially Wang BaoQiang, performance, this film could touch my deepest part in my heart. It is a pity that you don't like it, but it does't matter.

I can see why this movie seems strange to lots of people but if you have somewhat experienced the bitterness of life in small Chinese villages back in early 2000s this movies is amazing. This movie reveals the sad but intriguing conflicts that happened between man and man, man and woman, nature and society, modern civilization and restraining tradition, dream and reality. The story itself is not nearly as dramatic as the ones produced in Hollywood. Nevertheless it presented glimpses of desperate living hell that to some degree we all are stuck in.