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 Chinese director Lou Ye's "Tui Na" ("Blind Massage") is one
of three Chinese films in competition, all of which represent a
departure in being set outside of Beijing or Shanghai, with this
one being the second Lou has filmed in Nanjing.
The body count in Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland's "Kraftidioten"
("Order of Disappearance") eventually hits 21.
The victims' names and a symbol suited to their religion,
sometimes a Catholic cross, sometimes Orthodox, in one case a
Star of David, are shown in white lettering on a black screen at
the end of each bloody killing spree.
At first, the movie seems like a classic crime shoot-em-up, but
this one drew laughs from a press preview audience with its
references to the "Stockholm Syndrome", a discussion by two
gangsters of why northern countries have good welfare systems
and southern countries don't, and two of the tough guys turning
out to have a covert gay relationship.
"It's an original harebrained idea from Scandinavia," Moland
told a post-screening news conference. "It started out as an
idea many years ago to explore the sort of porous line between
our civil attributes and education and upbringing and being
confronted with our various sorts of primitive instincts that we
have when grave injustice is being done to us."
The bloodletting begins in a snowbound part of Norway when the
son of snowplow driver Nils, played by Scandinavian film veteran
Stellan Skarsgard, is mistakenly killed by a drug gang who think
the young man has stolen their cocaine.
Because the killers disguise the murder as a drug overdose, the
police are unwilling to investigate and Nils takes the law into
his own hands.
"When did you become 'Dirty Harry'?," his ex-criminal brother
asks him when Nils, who has killed off three of the drug gang's
henchmen and thrown them in a lake, comes to him for advice on
how to hire a hitman to kill off the crime boss.
The Norwegian drug kingpin is played by Pal Sverre Hagen as a
ruthless, sharp-suited vegan who drinks bio fruit juices and
whose luxurious home is a monument to bad-taste decorating.
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 His main rival is a Serbian druglord played by
veteran German actor Bruno Ganz. He said it was mostly a
non-speaking role because of his limited Serbian but that he had
tried to project his character as a big man, in the manner of the
late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Challenged on the amount of violence in this and his
other films, Moland said he was drawn to the theme of how violence
affects normal people.
"Violence is I think something that lurks in our depths as human
beings and thankfully we restrain ourselves most of the time and
occasionally it erupts. I'm interested in what violence does to
normal people, normal well-adjusted people."
BASED ON NOVEL
Based on a popular Chinese novel that has been made into a
television series, "Blind Massage" is partly a soap operatic look at
the lives, loves and frustrations of blind people working at a type
of massage clinic popular in China, and partly a remarkable
achievement with the integration of sighted Chinese actors with
blind people who had never acted before.
"It was a very great chance for us blind people,"
actress Zhang Lei said of appearing in the film.
"There are very few opportunities, and I know how to value this
chance I got. I think we played ourselves, we enacted ourselves,
that was it. We did not have a feeling of making a movie, it was
more or less our own life."
The festival ends on Saturday with the awarding of the Golden Bear
for best film and in other categories.
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