In a way, the title of Christopher Petit’s Chinese
Boxes sums up the odd feeling of lost-in-time absence that permeates the
movie, not just through the structural clue it contains (that one layer of apparent
explanation will be forcibly removed to reveal another, and so on) but also
through the evocation of China as abstract exoticism, not then seeming
relevant to any immediate economic conversation. Marsh (Will Patton), an
American in a still-partitioned Berlin, is the main inadvertent box-opener: a dead
business associate leading to a teenage girl overdosing in his apartment,
leading to a mysterious American called Harwood who says he’s a customs agent (Robbie
Coltrane) but doesn’t act like it, to mysterious assignments apparently
connected to drug trafficking, and to further killings and revelations. The film treats genre expectations with
enjoyable minimalism, depicting a car crash simply by cutting to the stunned passengers
inside the upside-down car, dispensing with scenes of gun- and fist-play so
glancingly that they hardly register at all, and allowing Peggy Lee’s “Is That
All There Is” (maybe a too-obvious choice) to make some meaningful-seeming
dialogue largely unintelligible; much the same goes for the film’s depiction of
Berlin, predominantly consisting of anonymous locations that might be anywhere.
It’s still a resonant choice though, with Harwood’s primary concern turning out
not to be drugs at all but rather the prospects for increased commerce between East
and West; he even presciently anticipates the possibility of reunification (as
a matter of economic if not political logic). The choice of aspect ratio
reinforces the sense of “boxiness” and confinement, of things perpetually on
the verge of inwardly collapsing. A key character’s final rejection of a free
ticket out, finding the prospect of leaving Berlin unimaginable, underlines all
that the movie leaves untapped, a sense of further boxes (or of entire sets of
boxes) not yet opened, or even dreamed of.
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