Cinema

Groundhog Day (PG', selected cinemas) The Story of Qiu Ju (`12', selected cinemas)

Second time around

Vanessa Letts

roundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, is a reasonably amusing old-fashioned comedy. At heart it promotes the need to be `nice', and though, unfortunately, this is the least successful aspect of the film, someone was trying.

Murray plays a sarcastic small-time TV weather forecaster (opening song: 'Can't you feel you're warming up — yeah, I'm your weatherman'). He hurls sardonic remarks indiscriminately at the camera and at those around him. He also gets the weather wrong. The secret of happiness eludes him, and thus he is set up by the film for a Lesson in Life.

He is sent by his TV station to cover Groundhog Day, 2 February, when tradi- tionally a groundhog pops out of a hole, staying out to herald spring only if it sees no shadow on the ground. If it casts a shad- ow, then six more weeks of winter are pre- dicted. Murray wakes up and covers the events of the day, going through the motions in his usual grumpy fashion. The 'Oh hell. . . gridlock.' next day when he gets up, to his astonish- ment and misery, it is Groundhog Day all over again! By the end of the film we have had Groundhog Day repeated for us more times than we can count.

This is a good basis for a nightmare com- edy. By the third Groundhog Day one member of the audience was so desperate he left, but Murray has no such option. Not even suicide can break him out of the cycle.

At first he just enjoys insulting the people who annoyed him the first time round. But he graduates pretty quickly from 'Don't mess with me, Pork Chops' to out-and-out crime. This, too, gets boring (ah, can it be true?) and, after multiple suicides fail, he decides to go in for ice sculpture and piano-playing instead.

All in all, what we have here is a moral tale. Murray shares his first name with the Groundhog. When the day comes that he himself wakes up, goes out and casts no shadow anywhere, then his winter, his dark night of the soul, is over. This being a movie, it is not just ice sculpture, but love that shows him the way.

But it is plain difficult to believe in a Bill Murray who enjoys saving lives, giving moving speeches and being nice to people.

Even if he has had countless opportunities to get just one day completely right, it is still a joke that he can walk along catching little boys as they fall out of trees. His inspiration, played by Andie MacDowell, is immensely tedious, so that we are not inspired by the idea of niceness ourselves. The film does, however, do a lot for the image of the second chance.

Zhang Yimou, who won many accolades and prizes for his first two films (including

Raise the Red Lantern), is doing equally well with his latest offering, the Story of Qiu Ju. Like Groundhog Day, it is based on the

idea of someone fighting a battle over and over with the same outcome each time. Qiu Ju's husband argues with the village chief, at which the village chief kicks him hard in the groin. Qiu Ju herself wants the village chief to apologise, but he won't. She takes her case through five levels of justice district officers, courts of appeal — but the apology doesn't come. Nevertheless, the consequences of her actions are far beyond what she anticipates.

It is a sad film. We are shown very clear- ly the cramped way in which the minds of its characters work. While much of this is simple human behaviour, there is a whole ethos of honour and face-saving that goes with it, and that perpetuates problems of all kinds. The film apparently reveals a pic- ture of modern China to us: there are long sequences shot in city streets with hidden Cameras; we see cheating taxi-drivers and peasants on their brick oven beds. At the same time it leaves the lingering impres- sion that China here has been stylised to the point where we should not quite

believe in it. What The Story of Qiu Ju says about human nature, however, is eminently believable.