In the Flesh: Black Coal, Thin Ice

Everywhere we turn in Black Coal, Thin Ice, women are being brutalized. Crushed. Trampled into paste and left for dead. Washed-up former cop Zhang Zili (Liao Fan) sexually assaults a coworker at his factory security guard gig. A cheerful husband blithely ignores his pregnant wife’s concerns about having cops and a confessed murderer blunder through their apartment to connect the dots of a murder that happened in their bedroom. “You stabbed him in the wardrobe?” the inspector asks when the murderer, Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun-mei), points to the spot the killing took place. “There used to be a bed there,” she responds, deadpan. We cut to a wider shot, revealing the harried wife sitting on her bed on the room’s far side, obviously imagining herself in the same situation. On which end of the knife, though? Director Diao Yinan’s moody, beautifully shot neo-noir asks us to contemplate the agency of these women rendered invisible by workaday misogyny and systemic oppression.

The man Zhizhen murdered first blackmailed her into sexual slavery, using the damage she’d done to his leather jacket — later implied to be considerably less valuable than he claimed — at the laundromat where she works as a pretext. In the film’s opening scene we watch as the man, Liang Zhijun (Wang Xuebing) assaults and terrorizes her on a train platform, forcing her into a pile of dirt near ongoing maintenance, a strange presentiment of his own disposal into and processing through provincial coal infrastructure. That this kind of violence is the engine on which society runs is evident at every level here. The body is identified by a worker ID found on its torso. The initial discovery of a severed arm occurs on the quality check conveyor belt of a coal refining plant. Yinan is telling us that society is operating as it should be expected to operate, chewing workers up and spitting out the bones. The immediate rightness of this image allows Zhizhen’s real crime to go undetected for years. A coal plant ID card is more real than flesh itself.

Much of Yinan’s film is concerned with minutiae and randomness, from the daylight fireworks which soundtrack its abruptly terminated final sequence to the innocent men Zhang confronts as suspects in the initial slaying who, for reasons unknown, seize a chance opportunity to shoot him and two of his fellow cops. The film’s portrayal of these strange turns of fate is artful and elliptical. A woman collapses fully clothed into a full bathtub. A cop idly kicks a bottle down concrete steps and we watch as it comes apart and shrinks into the distance with each step it bounces off of, a thing unmade for no reason, its shards spread over the staircase like the hunks of the corpses distributed along the coal delivery route. No one knows what really happened. For the most part no one cares. So what if a man raped a woman again and again over a tear in his favorite jacket? So what if that woman lived in terror of her husband after he concealed her crime by faking his own death? The world itself doesn’t even care about her confession, drowning out its aftermath in a blaze of fireworks set off by some unseen drunk atop an apartment building’s roof.