The lead character of Lithuanian director Jurgis Matulevičius’s sophomore feature, China Sea, is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Having fallen from grace after a street fight gone wrong, leading to him unhoused, boxing champion and rising star Osvald (Marius Repšys) must figure out what to do next. Matulevičius just presented China Sea as a world premiere at Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, six years after his debut film, Isaac. With a script by Toxic [+lire aussi :
critique
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fiche film] filmmaker Saule Bliuvaitė, the film is said to be the first-ever coproduction between Lithuania and Taiwan and just won the Best Film Award in the Critics’ Picks Competition.

We enter this story after Osvald is taken in by Ju-Long (Taiwanese actor Jag Huang), a Taiwanese immigrant who owns a local restaurant. The friendship between Osvald and Ju-Long is founded on some sort of mutual acknowledgment of trauma and pain, where the latter’s own life is bogged down by severe debt to local gangsters, forced to “pay back” what he owes in various gruesome ways. As Osvald tries to pick up the pieces, he heads to group therapy – where he meets a mysterious woman named Skaistė (Severija Janušauskaitė) – and finds a job coaching promising young women boxers at a local gym.

Well-earning its description of “Baltic noir”, the film leans into the grittiness of the Lithuanian winter through the lensing of DoP Bartosz Świniarski, who also paints the film in a set of extreme blues. China Sea, which refers to the name of the Taiwanese restaurant in Lithuanian, begins with an exciting cross-cultural premise but falls victim to begins slightly too ambitious for its own good. Repšys plays the embattled Osvald and his dose of anger management issues with utmost gusto, making him a character we very much want to root for. However, his romantic arc with Skaistė feels incomplete and begins to fall to the wayside as other aspects of the multi-pronged narrative take centre stage to an explosive but equally dark end.

A set of peculiar musical and dialogue choices straddle the border between adding texture to the film and exoticising Ju-Long and the very tiny Asian community that essentially is sheltered in this restaurant, hiding from the bleakness around them. The ways in which the Taiwanese family is depicted feels like an odd orientalisation of the Asian characters, even if unintentionally so – especially when it comes to how they express themselves. Huang, the most well-known Asian thesp in the film, does what he can with the character, but viewers may be left feeling unsettled by how not only him, but other characters throughout, are treated onscreen through the story.

China Sea is a production between Lithuania’s Film Jam, Lithuania’s Con Artist, Taiwan’s MA Studios, Poland’s Lava Films and the Czech Republic’s Bionaut.