This Covid-19 lockdown is my chance to somehow escape from the outside world and watch some movies for leisure. The past few years have seen me consuming non-Western cultural products and I am not stopping anytime soon, although from time to time I will watch western-produced films if they intrigue me, like for instance Black Panther and Little Women are on my list. In fact I started to watch a few minutes of Black Panther last night.
Sometimes I let youtube do the picking for me. The past few weeks I have been looking up classical Chinese poetry and I was shocked when 第三只眼 was recommended for me. I was thinking maybe it was some kind of porn but then seeing that it was made in Mainland China, I knew then that porn fans will be very much disappointed. China has a super strict censorship system that filters out media with gore and violence, sex, and horror stuff (ghosts). The latter I do not understand since Chinese folklore and even mythology has many supernatural creatures which of course figure prominently also in its cultural products. For instance, there is the the White Snake who is actually a snake demon but who has been reinterpreted many times to be a benevolent spirit.
Curious, I watched it. Nice opening. The scenes are shot like in those slow Japanese films which capture everyday objects up close, that you get to see certain aesthetics that will otherwise go unnoticed if the focus is more on human actions. A young woman is about to eat bottled fruit preserves when suddenly her water breaks and she gives birth on her own inside her house while even managing to close the door using her foot. It is not shown how she managed but then fast forward to her now six year old son to whom she now gives the bottled fruit preserves. This son is the main character/ narrator of the film. He is an intelligent boy, very observant and is also blessed with artistic hands. He uses the used bottles as seeing lenses, watching nature around him. Because it's just him and his mother, his mother takes him to the women's public bath house and there sees a girl with a butterfly on her left bosom. From that day on, he obsessed about the girl and even in college, all he could draw are butterflies much to the dismay of his professor whom he spies to have sexual relations with a girl model in her car. As a grown up, the narrator admits to being obsessed about peeping, becoming a voyeur but mainly monitoring Xiaoqi, the girl model with butterfly tattoo, because he thinks that she is the girl he has been looking for. He steals his professor's list of student information to get Xiaoqi's number and address, and even rents a flat strategically located across Xiaoqi's so he can observe her at ease. He even goes as far as stealing some items in Xiaoqi's car, replacing them with other items. He also sneaks into her apartment and afraid of being caught, he instinctively kidnaps Xiaoqi's cat. He wonders why of all the men who had one night stand with Xiaoqi, only one man was allowed to enter her flat. This man turned out to be her ex-husband, a weak-looking guy who obviously is just a toy for Xiaoqi.
When eventually the narrator confesses to his voyeurism to Xiaoqi the roles are reversed with Xiaoqi trying to seduce him in his flat while her ex-husband uses binoculars from her flat and sees the attempted seduction. She informs our peeping tom about the setup and he goes out running outside to be met by the ex-husband and the two trade punches. Then a host of realizations. Our narrator finally understands that Xiaoqi despises the ex-husband so much for his weakness that she deliberately lives a promiscuous life to maybe get a reaction from the husband but the latter has only been controlling without doing anything about their marital issues. In one of their attempted love-making, with Xiaoqi telling our narrator to watch, the husband is shown to have weak virility, and prefers to have the curtains closed. The film's message in the end "意识的表达态度在于燃烧自己的小宇宙时需谨慎面对， 切勿盲目。[The attitude to expressing our mind is that we need to be careful and clear-minded when we devote ourselves wholeheartedly.]" echoes the realization made by our main character who prefers to stalk and watch from afar in his comfort zone instead of making a move, that Xiaoqi is not the girl he has been obsessing about. He suddenly remembers that when he watched the girl in the bathhouse, he was looking at the mirror, so the butterfly is supposed to be on the other side. He suddenly also becomes aware that Xiaoqi is like a cat, dominant, freedom-loving, and a queen in her own rights.
An art film, 第三只眼 pushes it viewers who are voyeurs themselves in the whole dramatic affair to pay attention to the minutest of details, giving voyeurs an idea even of the skin texture due to close up shots of the characters' faces. Zooming out, especially at the surprising end wherein we see Xiaoqi's friend sun-bathing seductively in her terrace as the guy (narrator's friend) who chases her watches using his friend's telescope. The girl's behavior is in stark contrast to her earlier behavior wherein she dismisses the playboy guy and is always seen as the more sensible prior. The whole film invites careful observation and reflection before setting out to do something which requires effort.
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