Journey to the West (2021/3)

Original title: 宇宙探索编辑部

Tang Zhijun (Yang Haoyu) has spent his life hunting after UFO sightings and alien encounters, editing the magazine “Universe Exploration” about his obsessions. He’s never encountered anything extra-terrestrial, however, and public interest in his magazine has hit rock bottom. Today, a couple of years after the death by suicide of his daughter, Tang is sad and broken man, looking for alien contact in the static on his TV and trying to pay the heating bills of the magazine’s tiny office by holding lectures about UFOs in a psychiatric hospital.

After a sponsorship deal falls through under the kind of bizarre circumstances that appear to be part and parcel for Tang’s life, he encounters a video featuring strange aerial phenomena shot somewhere in Sichuan in Southwestern China. Tang decides to grab what’s left of his staff and go on one last big attempt at finding what he so desperately needs to believe in. It will be quite the odyssey.

Premiered in 2021, but only finding actual release a couple of years later, this first feature film directed by Kong Dashan is an astonishing thing. Stylistically, this begins with the look and tone of a fake documentary of the fly-on-the-wall, no commentary by the filmmakers type – including characters speaking directly to the camera in an interview setting - but one that grows increasingly peculiar and uses an increasing amount of visual and editing techniques of dramatic filmmaking, until it simply stops with the documentary approach altogether. This shouldn’t really work at all, or at least feel like a stark directorial imposition on the audience, but in Journey, these kinds of decisions feel like organic growth instead.

This sort of thing is absolutely programmatic for the film as a whole. Its wild mix of often very broad comedy, allusions to the Chinese literary classic it shares its English title with, in-jokes, moments of peculiarity that compare in their individual strangeness with somebody like Lynch (but have a very different emotional and intellectual resonance), science fiction, walking-based road movie, slow cinema with a touching movie about grief should not work at all. Instead of producing a series of tonally unrelated scenes, however, Kong manages to present all these strange idiosyncrasies in tone and style as parts that add up to an actual whole that expresses the feelings of a lost sense of wonder, loss of love and grief from loss that have nearly broken Tang much clearer than any more straightforward treatment could. Simply because lives, Tang’s, as well as those of the people he encounters and infuriates – and the audience’s - are this way, full of disparate elements that still become wholes in our minds. Seen from that perspective, the idiosyncrasies aren’t of course idiosyncrasies anymore, but actually a brilliant way to talk about some of our shared experiences in non-obvious ways, even though most of us – I presume – do not travel westwards to look for aliens.

Interesting for this old friend of the cosmicist, there’s also a bit of cosmicism in here, though the kinder, friendlier version of the philosophy that finds a bit of sadness and fear but also a sense of wonder that borders on joy in our own smallness in the universe. So more Clarke than Lovecraft. Seen from a certain direction, the film can be read as being about Tang’s journey from a softer, enthusiastic cosmicism through the harsher one, to a new, wiser version of it as much as it can be about him finally coming out at the other end of grief or about him learning to give up on dreams that have turned to poison for him.