Old Cao lies down with his prospective spirit bride in "The Cremator".
Published: January 24, 2013
That is what happens in an early scene of “The Cremator”, independent director Peng Tao’s latest film. Shown for the first time in China at a small Beijing film salon last week, “The Cremator” explores a modern consumer society and rural poverty in China through the practice of ‘spirit weddings’, (or minghun in Chinese). These posthumous pairings see two bodies buried in the same grave so that they can spend their afterlives together.
Set in China’s Shaanxi province, where the pull of this tradition remains strong, the film tells the story of Old Cao, a middle-aged man who works cremating bodies in the province’s capital, Xi’an. On the side, he is involved in the sordid trade of unclaimed female corpses. Brought to the crematorium when no identity is found, he helps to sell them as ‘spirit brides’ to people whose sons or brothers died bachelors.
“There are a lot of young miners in Shaanxi province, so a lot of people there die young,” the 38 year old director told ARTINFO. “Their lives are far from perfect, but they still hold on to the hope that the afterlife will be. That’s why it happens. There was even a murder case reported once, the motive being that a family wanted to find their deceased son a bride.”
Betraying the director’s background as a documentary maker, the film has a cast of unprofessional actors and no musical score. “In a way this is real life, so I wanted to give the film a sense of being real,” explains Peng.
The plot leaps forward when Old Cao, lonely and desperate after being abandoned by the married woman with whom he had struck up a romance, finds that he is suffering from a terminal disease. When the body of a woman found dredged up on a riverbank one night is brought into the crematorium, he makes plans to have her body taken to his hometown for burial, believing he is soon to join her.
But the arrival of the dead woman’s sister Xiuqiao, from whose search he at first tries to hide the body, is the point at which the human emotion and conflicts of modern society Peng explores in “The Cremator” are at their richest.
The unlikely pair fall into a mutually reliant friendship, colored and complicated by each character’s desperate need for money, and their battle with their own loneliness. “This is a very important point in Chinese history, with the conflicting and changing state of the economy, of our personal freedoms — there are points where life seems almost irreconcilable with itself,” said Peng.
The earliest example Peng found of these spirit wedings was the burial of a the legendary second century leader Cao Cao’s young son. The director was not only attracted be the idea of spirit weddings in themselves, but also by the way in which they remain relevant to people living in today’s China. “People in the countryside now have access to information, and they use it,” Peng says. “There is a big contrast between the phone, and what that wizard is wearing and doing, but he lives in the modern world too.”
And it is not only the conflicts between technology and growing consumerism with ancient traditions that the film addresses, it is also the battle with poverty that these people must endure in a rapidly developing country. “At every turn, Xiuqiao faces the problem that she cannot afford anything,” Peng says. “People from the countryside in China have the hardest lives. They live in a world where even dead bodies can fetch a price, and I hope that my film can say something about the complex relationship in China between money, morals and tradition.”
Originally posted in Artinfo China.
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