HITTING THE HIGH NOTES
Heartfelt tribute to Chinese opera company makes a wonderful onscreen connection
If this tale of a struggling Chinese opera company feels more like a documentary than a drama, well, there’s a good reason for that. Canadian writer-director Johnny Ma, inspired by an hour-long opera doc he saw a few years ago, decided to track down the performers and cast them in his own fictional production.
The result is To Live to Sing, a heartfelt, sympathetic story about artists facing urbanization and cultural change.
Zhao Li (Xiaoli Zhao) is the no-nonsense leader of a group of performers who have been together so long they behave like a family. That’s actually true in the case of Dan Dan (Guidan Gan), the youngest performer and the star of the show, who is also Zhao’s niece.
The performers live and work on the outskirts of Chengdu, a metropolis of 16 million that is the capital of the central province of Sichuan. But clearly their days are numbered. Even as they rehearse, the sound and dust of demolition crews grow closer; their ramshackle theatre space will soon become the location of another towering apartment block.
A patron or engaged audience might help, but the troupe’s regulars are mostly old men looking to pass the time in retirement. So Zhao goes looking for the local planning chief, wading into civic bureaucracy and trying to entice someone in authority to come and see them. It’s the ol’ let’s-put-on-a-show-to-save-the-theatre
tactic. The Muppets would be proud.
Alas, Zhao has trouble getting even her own performers to take matters seriously.
She learns that Dan Dan has been sneaking out at night to perform in a club, while another member argues that they should all get jobs in “bian lian,” in which the performer quickly changes masks in what amounts to a kind of magic show. It’s popular with tourists, he reasons, and the restaurants where it’s performed pay well and even provide a free lunch.
But Zhao is a traditionalist, and splits her time between trying to arrange for an audience with the planning chief, and arguing with her performers — sometimes at knifepoint — to remain true to their craft, come what may.
To Live to Sing is Ma’s second feature. His debut in 2016 was Old Stone, a nail-biting 80-minute thriller in which a taxi driver’s Good Samaritan behaviour after a traffic accident spirals into chaos when the hospital demands he pay another man’s medical bills.
This one has a very different atmosphere, sometimes even straying into magic realism. Zhao at one point has a very realistic (and beautifully shot) dream about the impending demolition, while another scene finds her daydreaming about spectacular changes to the show’s choreography. And who is that bearded, impish character scuttling down the street when she goes out; artistic guardian angel or figment of her imagination?
To be clear, To Live to Sing is not a documentary, but it may still function as a record of a vanishing way of life.
“Opera isn’t cool any more,” one of the troupe says dispiritedly, as they prepare to disband. But then one of their elderly fans asks: “Can’t you just take us with you?”
Ma has done just that with his new film, dropping us into this group’s world and letting us hang out with them. It’s a wonderful moment of connection.