{"id":660709,"date":"2026-10-29T14:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660709\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T14:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:38:08","slug":"fuxi-four-tales-of-feasting-review-a-cinematic-banquet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/660709\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Fuxi: Four Tales of Feasting’ Review: A Cinematic Banquet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLauded for the stylized studio environments of his debut fiction feature, 2021\u2019s Locarno prizewinner \u201cA New Old Play,\u201d Qiu Jiongjiong<\/a> returns to the soundstage for a second helping in his follow-up, \u201cFuxi: Four Tales of Feasting<\/a>.\u201d \u201cA New Old Play\u201d told the story of an actor who played different roles in successive epochs of Chinese history, and made his life into a three-hour pageant by using stage techniques: rippling bedsheets dyed a watery blue for ocean waves; fake plastic trees for nature. \u201cFuxi\u201d has no such neat thematic relation between subject and style, but it\u2019s a joy to be back on the soundstage with Qiu regardless. <\/p>\n

\n\tNow acting as his own production designer as well, writer-director-editor Qiu serves up more painted backdrops and practical theatrical effects, this time in an anthology film in which a cast toplined by Lee Kang-sheng play multiple roles in rhyming chapters centered around food. It\u2019s a four-course feast for the eyes, even if \u201cA New Old Play\u2019s\u201d intertwined themes of art, memory, and China\u2019s tumultuous 20th century offered more food for thought.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFuxi\u201d \u2014 a word translated by an opening title card as \u201ca tasty delicacy, or the act of eating it\u201d \u2014 circles ideas of ritual and community, embodied by tasty-looking Sichuan food and, at times, fairly detailed instructions for cooking it. The appeal to arthouse audiences is obvious, though the international critics and programmers who compared \u201cA New Old Play\u201d to Jia Zhangke\u2019s politically ambitious \u201cPlatform\u201d may find \u201cFuxi\u201d less substantial. Qiu operates in a more folkloric mode, beginning with the film\u2019s first segment, \u201cThe Ancestors\u2019 Fuxi,\u201d set among a prehistoric tribe whose members are recognizably human, except for their tails. As a member of the tribe approaches the end of her life, it is explained, she cuts off her own tail, and prepares it as a soup, to feed her descendants as part of her burial rites.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe dying granny, who chops away at her appendage with a prop hatchet, is played by Lee, sporting a silver wig seemingly fashioned of rope. Famous as Tsai Ming-liang\u2019s longtime muse, Lee has a sly charisma that peeks out at the edges of even his most morose roles, as it does here. Lee reappears as another female elder in \u201cThe King\u2019s Fuxi,\u201d which jumps ahead by at least one millennium \u2014 people no longer have tails, and their diet has diversified. There\u2019s agriculture now \u2014 villagers toil behind tiered hillsides fashioned from flat boards painted with abstract green swirls \u2014 and animal husbandry. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn the \u201cAncestors\u201d segment, wild dogs, played by actors in masks and black unitards, howl on the village outskirts; by the second segment, they\u2019re kept as pets, and one (voiced by Qiu himself) even narrates the story. Society has become more hierarchical: The food Lee\u2019s character serves is an offering to her king, who has abdicated in order to live as a bird (he floats through hand-painted clouds and smoke-machine haze on digitally removed wires), but still returns once a year to taste the tribute of his subjects.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis king is based on Duyu, a figure from Sichuan legend (\u201cDuyu\u201d means \u201ccuckoo\u201d), and one who may be inspired by a real figure who introduced the core principles of farming to the region. But even as \u201cFuxi\u201d moves into recorded history, it remains in a liminal space between textbook and myth, material world and spirit world. In the third, most substantial segment, \u201cThe Litterateur\u2019s Fuxi,\u201d four spirits \u2014 including one played by Xue Xuchun, who portrayed a similar underworld guide in \u201cA New Old Play\u201d \u2014 assemble in a 1997 represented by cutouts of skyscrapers backlit through lighting-gel windows. They\u2019re gathering to share a festive banquet at which each course triggers a memory from the life of the Song dynasty dissident poet Su Dongpo (Lee Hong-chi); amid the artifice of Qiu\u2019s mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, overhead shots of pork belly browning on a bubbling skillet, or fish steaming in chilis, stand out for their earthiness, and the use of offcuts such as a lamb\u2019s spine makes a stark commentary on the pains of exile.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf \u201cFuxi\u201d has a political agenda, it\u2019s to be found in this section\u2019s look at the responsibilities of an artist, though the fourth section, \u201cSworn Brothers\u2019 Fuxi,\u201d set at the dawn of the 20th century, is much more typical in its oblique and disguised musings on the promises and disappointments of modernity. A boy (Zhou Jiarui, one of the great-grandsons in \u201cThe Ancestors\u2019 Fuxi\u201d) runs away from servitude in a kitchen and, pursued by officers of the dying Qing dynasty, falls in with three of the spirits from the previous chapter, a motley gang of outlaws or ghosts who teach him to make congee, and about the virtues it requires \u2014 patience when preparing a meal, camaraderie when sharing it. The film\u2019s overarching philosophy, as summed up in its final sequences, is stoic, bawdy and not particularly deep: \u201cWe eat, we shit, and that\u2019s it, as of old.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFreedom, for Qiu, seems to mean the freedom, in his storytelling, to repeatedly cross borders between life and death, and between different layers of fiction. \u201cFuxi\u201d has a frame story, but it\u2019s hard to tell where the frame ends and the story begins: Sol (Wen Ke) and Luna (Xiao Luxi), wearing respective sun and moon headpieces, look down on the feasting mortals, occasionally falling to earth but also appearing in interstitial sequences tinted, like a silent movie, either sepia or steel-blue, in which a film crew preps the Fuxi sequences.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a recurring image, Sol and Luna seesaw on a foam mountain, rising and falling in turn as the days and centuries flow by below. Qiu\u2019s eloquence lies in such playful gestures, which are pleasurable for their own sake. \u201cFuxi\u201d takes place on sets with the heightened artificiality of a Hollywood backlot; Qiu\u2019s handcraft is so sumptuous and elaborate that \u201cresourceful\u201d doesn\u2019t cover it. In an era when digital effects work \u2014 and, increasingly, gen-AI imagery \u2014 is used as a quick fix for corner-cutting productions at all budget levels, every one of \u201cFuxi\u2019s\u201d intricately wrought tactile flourishes is a luxury good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lauded for the stylized studio environments of his debut fiction feature, 2021\u2019s Locarno prizewinner \u201cA New Old Play,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,297348,85,46,397,297349,71671],"class_list":["post-660709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-fuxi-four-tales-of-feasting","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-qiu-jiongjiong","tag-tokyo-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}