"Quitting" may be as much about exiting a pre-ordained identity as about drug withdrawal. As a rural guy coming to Beijing, class and success must have struck this young artist face on as an appeal to separate from his roots and far surpass his peasant parents' acting success. Troubles arise, however, when the new man is too new, when it demands too big a departure from family, history, nature, and personal identity. The ensuing splits, and confusion between the imaginary and the real and the dissonance between the ordinary and the heroic are the stuff of a gut check on the one hand or a complete escape from self on the other. Hongshen slips into the latter and his long and lonely road back to self can be grim.

But what an exceptionally convincing particularity, honesty, and sensuousness director Zhang Yang, and his actors, bring to this journey. No clichés, no stereotypes, no rigid gender roles, no requisite sex, romance or violence scenes, no requisite street language and, to boot, no assumed money to float character acts and whims. 

Hongshen Jia is in his mid-twenties. He's a talented actor, impressionable, vain, idealistic, and perhaps emotionally starved. The perfect recipe for his enablers. Soon he's the "cool" actor, idolized by youth. "He was hot in the early nineties." "He always had to be the most fashionable." He needs extremes, and goes in for heavy metal, adopts earrings and a scarf. His acting means the arts, friends--and roles, But not the kind that offer any personal challenge or input. And his self-criticism, dulled by the immediacy of success, opens the doors to an irrational self-doubt, self-hatred-- "I didn't know how to act" "I felt like a phony"--and to readily available drugs to counter them. He says "I had to get high to do what director wanted." So, his shallow identity as an actor becomes, via drugs, an escape from identity. 

Hongshen's disengagement from drugs and his false life is very gradual, intermittent--and doggedly his own. Solitude, space, meditative thinking, speech refusal, replace therapy. The abstract is out. And a great deal of his change occurs outdoors---not in idealized locations but mainly on green patches under the freeways, bridges, and high-rises of Beijing. The physicality is almost romantic, but is not. The bike rides to Ritan Park, the long spontaneous walks, the drenching sun and rain, grassy picnics, the sky patterns and kites that absorb his musing are very specific. He drifts in order to arrive, all the while picking up cues to a more real and realistic identity. "I started to open up" he says of this period in retrospect. And the contact seems to start with his lanky body which projects a kind of dancer's positioning (clumsy, graceful, humorous, telling) in a current circumstance. If mind or spirit is lacking, his legs can compel him to walk all night. 

Central to his comeback is the rejection of set roles. To punctuate his end to acting and his determination to a new identity, he smashes his videos and TV, and bangs his head till bloody against his "John Lennon Forever" poster. He has let down his iconic anti-establishment artist---but he's the only viable guide he knows. He even imagines himself as John's son (Yoko Ono), and adopts his "Mother Mary" as an intercessor in his "hour of darkness" and "time of trouble." (the wrenching, shaking pain in the park--hallucinatory and skitzoid ordeals) "Music is so much more real than acting" he says. And speaks of Lennon's influence as "showing me a new way." In the mental institute, the life-saving apples (resistance, nourishment) reflect Lennon's presence, as does Hongshen's need to re-hang his hero's poster in his redecorated room.

If Lennon's influence is spiriting, Hongshen's father's influence is grounding. Although father and son are both actors and users (drugs and drink), it is Fegsen's differences from his son that underwrites his change. For the father is more secure in himself: he accepts that he's Chinese, a peasant in a line of peasants, a rural theater director. And he exercises control over both his habit and his emotions. It's this recognizable identity that drives Hongshen to treat him like a sounding board, sometimes with anger and rage, sometimes with humor (the blue jeans, Beatles) and passivity. In his most crazed, and violent exchange with his father in which he accuses him of being a liar, and a fake, he exposes more of himself than his father: "all the acts I acted before were bullshit... life is bullshit." And to Hongshen's emphatic "you are NOT my father," he softly replies, "why can't a peasant be your father?" 

Under these two teachers and with much additional help from his mother, sister, friends, inmates at the rehab inst., he makes some tangible connection to a real (not whole) self. As the long term drug effects recede, so does his old identity. Indebtedness replaces pride, trust distrust. Integrity banishes his black cloud. All his edges soften. "You are just a human being" he repeats endlessly after being released from the strap-down incurred for refusing medicine. Back home, lard peasant soap is fine with him now. And his once "rare and true friendships" begin again as is so evident in the back to poignant back-to-back fence scene with his musician buddy. Hongshen says of this movie: "it's a good chance to think about my life." And I might add, become a New Actor, one bound to art and life. Like Lennon, he has gained success without a loss of identity.

Sentiment: positive