‘Man in Black’ Review: Wang Bing’s Mid-Length Art Piece Is Part Memoir, Part Music, All Mesmerizing
86-year-old Chinese composer Wang Xilin uses his naked body and his life story as eloquent vessels of protest art in this extraordinary, achingly beautiful hour-long film.
The man is not in black. He is in nothing at all. Wearing his nakedness calmly, like a fact so obvious it requires no explanation, an 86-year-old Chinese male stands up slowly in the otherwise empty gallery of Paris’ famous Bouffes du Nord theatre. The artfully peeling, faded-grandeur interior, dim but for gathered pools of warm light, booms with the sound of his wooden seat swinging back into place, then with the creaks of the floorboards under his bare feet. This is the arresting opening to Chinese documentarian Wang Bing’s other Cannes 2023 film, “Man in Black,” a project so diametrically different from his Competition entry “Youth: Spring” that it feels hard to credit them both to the same person. Perhaps we shouldn’t. This brief but profoundly moving film represents such a consummate collaboration between director, cinematographer, editor and subject that its authorship could be recorded as a four-way tie.
Short where “Youth” is long; elegiac where “Youth” is observational; a burnished, pared-back sculpture where “Youth” is a work of surfeit and assembly, “Man in Black” can most easily, if inadequately, be described as a biographical document on Wang Xilin, a modern classical composer who endured 14 years of persecution — including beatings, torture and imprisonment — after falling out of favor with the Chinese Communist Party. He then lived through many subsequent years of ostracization by state forces that were both threatened by and covetous of his growing national and international reputation as an artist of exceptional integrity and virtuosity.
But you can know none of this for the first third of “Man in Black,” which is initially an abstract experience. Wang Xilin sidles along the gallery and descends a stairwell to a sudden explosion of music, as one of his remarkable compositions bursts onto the soundtrack like a wave crashing against a tide wall. The wave recedes as he steps onto the theater’s unadorned stage, moving from spotlit place to spotlit place enacting a strange dance, portrayed with a fluidity that owes much to the intuitively graceful cutting rhythms of Claire Atherton’s editing, and even more to Caroline Champetier’s astonishing camera.