Words that Maketh Murder or the Price of Being a Flamingo
"Gossip is dangerous", warns ominously one of the characters in Tender Light, a teacher, as he attempts to discipline his rebellious teenage daughter. His parental admonishment is not unwarranted. In the small fictional town of Qingshui around the year 2000, everybody gossips about everybody else. But the most pervasive and prurient gossip has been ferociously circling one young woman, Nan Ya, for years without relenting.
Nan Ya is conspicuously different from other womenfolk in town. She has a wicked step-mother, an abusive husband and a sick daughter; unlike most, she has no relatives to stand up for her, which makes her an easy target for malicious rumors. Moreover, unlike most, who quickly lose the flush of their youth worn down by the mundanity of daily making do, Nan Ya is a beauty - even at the ripe old age of 30. She looks beautiful as she walks about the streets with the fluid grace of a dancer. She creates beautiful clothes to make a living and beautiful toys to amuse her little girl. She privately reads beautiful poetry and listens to beautiful music. Every once in a while, she seeks out beautiful nature spots in the vicinity of the dreary little town. She does so, she says, to remind herself that she is alive.
On the Millennium Eve full of fireworks, food, song and laughter, Nan Ya reports herself to the police. She killed her abusive husband, she says, in legitimate self-defense. There is an eye-witness to the incident: a young man, more than ten years her junior, Zhou Lou. On the face of it, Zhou Lou seems like an ordinary teenager. The only thing making him stand our from the crowd is his uncommon talent for academic achievement. His top grades had already won him a place at a prestigious national-level university, which he had left under mysterious circumstances - a subject of much speculation in his home town. However, thanks to the support of his loving family, he has been given a second chance. After some extra study at the cram school back home, he will be able to reapply at another prestigious university and hopefully leave the dreary small town, with its lack of opportunities of any kind, far behind him.
The upcoming police investigation should be pretty straightforward. There is a confession by the killer; there is a matching account by an eye-witness. But the police detective in charge of the investigation - himself originally an academically successful local boy, now assigned to his backwater hometown as a stepping stone in his promising career - does not think so. Together with his local colleagues, he keeps investigating long after the sequence of events seems to have been established beyond reasonable doubt. He is doggedly determined to find out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The witnesses interrogated by the police are all, for their own various reasons, unreliable narrators. The police detective keeps telling the suspect, his colleagues, his girlfriend and himself that he simply seeks to do his duty by fully examining all the facts and circumstances of the case through an objective lens. Yet it soon becomes apparent that he is just like everybody else: we have increasingly strong reasons to believe that his motivations are mixed at best and highly dubious at worst. Thus, as the story of the main protagonists and their community is slowly peeled episode after episode, layer after layer, we remain kept in suspense not only as to what actually happened on the Millennium Eve, but also as to what is currently going on and who is pursuing which goals. Shady deals, family secrets, hopeful aspirations, fatal infatuations progressively emerge in bits and pieces through the prism of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, all against the backdrop of intergenerational poverty, institutional dysfunction and deeply ingrained prejudices.
Tender Light is a poignant psychological study and an acute social commentary presented in the form of a moody, gorgeously shot, unapologetically poetic thriller noir. I am strongly tempted to call it a masterpiece. Every aspect of the drama is carefully crafted to create a suspense mystery embedded in stark realism but tenderly infused with haunting melancholy. Direction, script, cinematography, acting, scenography, costumes and, the last but not the least, the score and the brilliantly curated lyricism, all conspire to create a work of art whose bitterness and sweetness you can still taste long after it's finished.
My only reservation concerns some excessively melodramatic moments. Practically very protagonist of Tender Light undergoes an emotional breakdown at some point or another. For most characters, it makes perfect sense; for a few, less so. This is not a minor detail as it impacts the story as a whole. Had at least one of those few characters remained steadily grounded in their usual benevolence and/or common sense, without crumbling down under pressure, they could have shifted the tide of the story and spared us the unsatisfying yet inevitable ending, abruptly presented in documentarist form.
As it is, once that the case is officially untangled and the facts are fully revealed, there is nothing to shield us from the unrelieved dark truth eternally plaguing close-knit communities around the world. Gossip is dangerous. Don't be a flamingo in a flock of pigeons. If you stick out from the average and refuse to compromise and conform, you will be brought down, over and over again, until you leave, die or fit in.
Incidentally, Tender Light seems to be a flamingo in a flock of pigeons in and of itself. It stands head and shoulders above the standard C-drama industry entertainment, yet I only happened to discover it by accident. Do not skip this unique drama just because you are afraid of facing a few unpalatable truths. If you fear sinking too deeply into doom and gloom and losing faith in humanity after watching Tender Light, just follow it up with Meet Yourself, a much more joyful, healing and heart-warming take on the merits and demerits of a small tight-knit community.
Many thanks to other reviewers of Tender Light for helping me discover this hidden gem.
Nan Ya is conspicuously different from other womenfolk in town. She has a wicked step-mother, an abusive husband and a sick daughter; unlike most, she has no relatives to stand up for her, which makes her an easy target for malicious rumors. Moreover, unlike most, who quickly lose the flush of their youth worn down by the mundanity of daily making do, Nan Ya is a beauty - even at the ripe old age of 30. She looks beautiful as she walks about the streets with the fluid grace of a dancer. She creates beautiful clothes to make a living and beautiful toys to amuse her little girl. She privately reads beautiful poetry and listens to beautiful music. Every once in a while, she seeks out beautiful nature spots in the vicinity of the dreary little town. She does so, she says, to remind herself that she is alive.
On the Millennium Eve full of fireworks, food, song and laughter, Nan Ya reports herself to the police. She killed her abusive husband, she says, in legitimate self-defense. There is an eye-witness to the incident: a young man, more than ten years her junior, Zhou Lou. On the face of it, Zhou Lou seems like an ordinary teenager. The only thing making him stand our from the crowd is his uncommon talent for academic achievement. His top grades had already won him a place at a prestigious national-level university, which he had left under mysterious circumstances - a subject of much speculation in his home town. However, thanks to the support of his loving family, he has been given a second chance. After some extra study at the cram school back home, he will be able to reapply at another prestigious university and hopefully leave the dreary small town, with its lack of opportunities of any kind, far behind him.
The upcoming police investigation should be pretty straightforward. There is a confession by the killer; there is a matching account by an eye-witness. But the police detective in charge of the investigation - himself originally an academically successful local boy, now assigned to his backwater hometown as a stepping stone in his promising career - does not think so. Together with his local colleagues, he keeps investigating long after the sequence of events seems to have been established beyond reasonable doubt. He is doggedly determined to find out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The witnesses interrogated by the police are all, for their own various reasons, unreliable narrators. The police detective keeps telling the suspect, his colleagues, his girlfriend and himself that he simply seeks to do his duty by fully examining all the facts and circumstances of the case through an objective lens. Yet it soon becomes apparent that he is just like everybody else: we have increasingly strong reasons to believe that his motivations are mixed at best and highly dubious at worst. Thus, as the story of the main protagonists and their community is slowly peeled episode after episode, layer after layer, we remain kept in suspense not only as to what actually happened on the Millennium Eve, but also as to what is currently going on and who is pursuing which goals. Shady deals, family secrets, hopeful aspirations, fatal infatuations progressively emerge in bits and pieces through the prism of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, all against the backdrop of intergenerational poverty, institutional dysfunction and deeply ingrained prejudices.
Tender Light is a poignant psychological study and an acute social commentary presented in the form of a moody, gorgeously shot, unapologetically poetic thriller noir. I am strongly tempted to call it a masterpiece. Every aspect of the drama is carefully crafted to create a suspense mystery embedded in stark realism but tenderly infused with haunting melancholy. Direction, script, cinematography, acting, scenography, costumes and, the last but not the least, the score and the brilliantly curated lyricism, all conspire to create a work of art whose bitterness and sweetness you can still taste long after it's finished.
My only reservation concerns some excessively melodramatic moments. Practically very protagonist of Tender Light undergoes an emotional breakdown at some point or another. For most characters, it makes perfect sense; for a few, less so. This is not a minor detail as it impacts the story as a whole. Had at least one of those few characters remained steadily grounded in their usual benevolence and/or common sense, without crumbling down under pressure, they could have shifted the tide of the story and spared us the unsatisfying yet inevitable ending, abruptly presented in documentarist form.
As it is, once that the case is officially untangled and the facts are fully revealed, there is nothing to shield us from the unrelieved dark truth eternally plaguing close-knit communities around the world. Gossip is dangerous. Don't be a flamingo in a flock of pigeons. If you stick out from the average and refuse to compromise and conform, you will be brought down, over and over again, until you leave, die or fit in.
Incidentally, Tender Light seems to be a flamingo in a flock of pigeons in and of itself. It stands head and shoulders above the standard C-drama industry entertainment, yet I only happened to discover it by accident. Do not skip this unique drama just because you are afraid of facing a few unpalatable truths. If you fear sinking too deeply into doom and gloom and losing faith in humanity after watching Tender Light, just follow it up with Meet Yourself, a much more joyful, healing and heart-warming take on the merits and demerits of a small tight-knit community.
Many thanks to other reviewers of Tender Light for helping me discover this hidden gem.
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