Little man. Today, the author’s (or festival, which is more convenient) cinema of China is certainly striving for realism. Historical cinema from China, conquering Western festivals in the 80s and 90s, transformed into local blockbusters, which with phenomenal success are shown in their homeland. The fashion for exoticism has passed, and now the current stars of China on the international cinema arena, such as Jia Zhangke ("Touch of Sin" 2013, "Ash is the purest white" 2018), Wang Xiaoshuai ("Beijing Bicycle" 2000, "Chongqing Blues" 2010), Diao Yinan ("Black coal, thin ice" 2014, "Lake of wild geese" 2019) and many others reflect in their paintings the modern state of Chinese society. The heroes of their films are often ordinary people, through whose lives directors try to comprehend the social and political problems that concern them. Zhou Zhou is no exception to this.
In his second film, The Flower Sprinkled with Scarlet, Zhou Zhou stars a young Chinese woman as a ticket controller in a small movie theater. Her dream is to dance tango, resume a successful sports career, but a terrible ailment in the form of epilepsy blocks her from this path. Illness and a difficult childhood without parents who abandoned her at an early age, formed a difficult character of the girl, as a result of which she hardly finds a common language with people and relies only on herself. Loneliness and meaningless existence torment her. Remembering her recently departed grandfather, who raised and cared for her, she often thinks about death and the years she lived.
The director, inheriting, first of all, European methods of film construction, forms his work almost as documentary. He is extremely accurate in fixing the present time and is eager to penetrate into the essence of the little man (according to all the laws of Russian literature), to understand how he can realize his presence in the complex and heterogeneous Chinese society. Zhou’s diagnosis is far from optimistic: a small person is so small that it is no longer subject to further reduction. Here and noteworthy is the name, which is more accurately translated in the Russian box office - "Flower sprinkled with scarlet", in contrast to the international - "Only you alone". The main heroine is a “flower”, which is prevented not only by immanent tragedy, something disturbing, “alley”, but also by external factors that “sprinkle” her existence: a money issue, difficult relations with the opposite sex, lack of intimacy with blood relatives. It is as if it is in limbo, as if on an endless carousel, which will throw it high into the sky, then drop it into an endless abyss. This existential uncertainty bothers not only the heroine, but also the author, who literally cuts off his film, ending it with a significant understatement. This is the tragedy of a small man in the vast Chinese world, which is transformed from a local and limited cultural framework into a global and universal, understandable to anyone.