Oxhide (2006)

There is one scene in this film where the dad is explaining to his family about his own father’s cure for constipation. It involved a chopstick and a sugary mixture. Are you envisaging now what I was a few hours ago? Eye watering stuff and an example of the kind of conversational dialogue we follow from this family as they spend a few days together. The cast consists of the director (Jiayin Liu) and her real parents Huifen Jai (mum) and Zaiping Liu (dad) and they live in a tiny flat in Beijing - that might as well have been a cave; supplementing their meagre income by turning ox hides into luxury goods that people no longer really want unless they are discounted out of any semblance of profitability. They enjoy each other’s company sometimes, they bicker and squabble at other times but what is soon clear from this intimately shot feature is they have no idea how to escape the cycle of cramped poverty in which they live. For a while I was entertained, even intrigued, by their antics but quite swiftly I became less interested in this glacially paced docudrama. Aside from the fact that there is probably more natural light on the dark side of the moon, the photography lingers - or ought that to be languishes - for minutes at a time on shots that add little to the pace or depth of the story and as is always the case with these authentic styles of real-time films, they can be excruciatingly dull. If you are to think back to when you were young and kept a diary. Most of the time there was nothing remotely interesting to put in it. It’s the rare days when you first see “Star Wars” or meet your first love or win the lottery, the rest of your live is usually pretty mundane - so why might anyone want to watch a film that conveys much of the fractiousness that emanates from that combination of that ennui and some fictional scenarios that reinforce them. Being an actual family, there is an obvious chemistry on display here but given some of this is extra storytelling, it isn’t always clear when they are acting in character,when they acting a character or when they aren't acting at all. Perhaps it could have been better as a short feature, lost up to an hour and focussed more intensely on their almost cell-like existence where it wasn’t just the ox that was hiding?