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JIANG WEN, CHINA, 2000
Devils on the Doorstep might go down in history as the film that abruptly halted the promising directing career of Jiang Wen. Arguably the most charismatic actor of his generation-he was Gong Li's rogue lover in Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum-Jiang received a prize in Venice for the first film he directed, In the Heat of the Sun (94), then a Best Director Award at Cannes for Devils. Inexplicably, the film was banned in China and its director exiled from the film industry. (Two years on, Jiang is working again as an actor, starring in five movies this year alone.) However, the film was released in France last year and is finally hitting American screens, albeit shortened by some 30 minutes. The cuts reflect the concerns of the film's Western distributors, not the diktats of the Chinese censors.
Yet there is more to Devils than a story of censorship, repression, and victimized grace. Jiang was never given an official "reason" for his punishment, and it is almost impossible for a Western mind to totally comprehend the scars left on the Chinese psyche by the war with Japan. As the film's protagonist, the young peasant Ma Dasan (powerfully played by Jiang himself), is relentlessly tossed back and forth between village farce and reluctant heroics, the film maintains...