THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
From China, a socio-political laboratory of great amplitude and muted violence, we regularly receive films whose density, harshness, singularity testify to what is taking place in this theater of operations where communist autocracy and ultraliberalism. H6, first unexpected feature-length documentary by a Chinese director living in France since 2001, is a new example. Indeed, Ye Ye returned to her native country in 2015 to film the fate of a few patients and their families in People’s Hospital No. 6 in Shanghai. A setting which immediately induces a contrast between the destitution to which the disease brings man and the gigantism of an establishment which receives two million patients a year, and by extension the city of Shanghai itself, a megalopolis of four twenty million inhabitants become the paragon of Chinese power and modernity.
This cruel irony is at the heart of H6, but redeemed by the humanity of the way the director looks at these tragedies, without taking anything away from their gravity. The film’s introduction emphasizes mass urban movements. Subway exit, hospital entrance, human traffic jams at checkouts, streets overloaded with cars, bicycles, pedestrians. By gradually individualizing a few figures – moreover, most of them victims of an accident of this proliferating traffic – the film indicates that here, more than elsewhere, the presence of an individual on the screen is suddenly of strength. Here are the heroes, broken into a thousand pieces, suffering martyrdom, surrounded by their own who would, in vain, serve as a bulwark against the implacable grinder of Chinese social reality.
An old lady intubated in all directions, inert to the point that one believes her to be dead on her bed, to whom a very delicate old gentleman, her husband, comes to keep company, to talk to her, to touch her, to pour her the drop with a pipette. -drip of an elixir which is none other than that of the unconditional love he has for her. Further on, a little girl with a doll’s face, beautiful as the day, her hand crushed by a bus, wrapped in an enormous bandage, tears in her eyes, suffering in her body, which her father and grandfather clumsily try to comfort. Here, a teenager, her legs crushed in a car accident in which her mother perished, and to whom her father, who refuses to tell her the truth, sings popular songs like someone possessed. There a peasant, fallen from a tree, who broke his spine, and his wife and son, their lives henceforth shattered in their turn, who dare not contradict his hope of getting back on their feet.
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