Censor's role not one for mere mortals

Expurgating unsavory content from movies comes with good intentions but often ends up with unintended real-life black humor.

Gone With the Bullets is a highly anticipated Chinese film. Unlike most films where the biggest suspense comes at the last reel, this Jiang Wen undertaking has a suspenseful beginning. To be accurate, the cliffhanger took place 11 days before the movie opened on Dec 18.

A media screening to be held on Dec 7 was canceled on short notice, shocking legions of reporters who had come from across the country to take a first look. They were told the movie had not passed censorship as had been expected, so could not be shown even to an invited audience.

That night, a photo of a page allegedly containing the opinions of the censors surfaced online. The reasons given are very specific: "Some plots and dialogues are crude, making fun of classics and celebrities, or containing sexual innuendoes. They must be rectified. Specifically, the close-up shots of kicking legs and twisting buttocks must be deleted from the opening dance sequence. The moving shot through a phalanx of legs must be deleted." The list goes on.

That moving shot, as far as I know, is a tribute to Busby Berkeley, an American filmmaker who exceled at shooting dance numbers in the golden age of 1930s Hollywood. It is probably considered bawdy without venturing into the realm of risque. Most of the "inappropriate" elements ordered excised are even less conspicuous. They mostly involve puns that would elicit knowing chuckles from adults but totally elude children.

To be fair, within the Chinese context this film is not an outlier in terms of adult content. It is titillating at most. For a better perspective, a coming-of-age romantic film that is boffo with box-office turnout this month has a plotline about abortion, as did several hit movies of the same genre in the recent past. And graphic violence is commonplace in action and war movies.

To show how much China has progressed in screen explicitness, a love story 30 years ago could show only a pair of lovers holding hands or sharing a bike, and nowadays even the most puritanical viewer has raised no objection over the couple "rolling with the bedsheet", a Chinese euphemism for having sex. But, in this case, it should be taken both literally and figuratively. It seems that, as long as the couple's bodies are not fully revealed, the act of sex is allowed on Chinese screens, at least partially.