The Shaft

A brooding, pessimistic film more laudable for its visual rather than narrative aspects, this atmospheric look into the uphill struggles of the rural underclass in China nevertheless offers a convincing, if uneven, portrayal of a miner's family shaken to its core by the uncertain future of its youngest members. In a western Chinese mining province's beleaguered industrial center—surrounded by majestic mountain peaks—class mobility is nearly nonexistent, and the urban prosperity of Beijing seems as distant as the moon. Family patriarch Baogen (Luo Deyuan), who is set in his workaday ways in an administrative post for the local mining company, is nearing retirement. His wife has left mysteriously; his daughter, Jingshui (Zheng Luoqian), stands accused of an extramarital affair at work; and his son, Jingsheng (Huang Xuan), harbors pipe dreams of becoming a singer, but he can't afford to take lessons at the local conservatory. A future career spent down in the mines is the sword of Damocles hanging over Jingsheng's head, as well as those of many of his peers. While writer-director Zhang Chi's The Shaft occasionally displays flashes of romanticized lost-youth sentiment and takes a few ill-advised leaps into soap-operatic territory, it also successfully puts a human face on the very real social, occupational, and economic anxieties plaguing a Chinese working class who are forever gazing out across the seemingly unbridgeable chasm of an economic divide. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)