Director – Jurgis Matulevičius – 2025 – Lithuania, Taiwan, Poland, Czechia – 96m
*****
A former champion kickboxer whose career has been destroyed by his poor anger management attempts to find direction in life – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
World champion kickboxer Osvald Gurevicious (Marius Rapsys) has it all, but unfortunately is a bit too full of himself, accidentally clobbering a woman who is standing in the wrong place during a bar room brawl. We see him at the height of his success, playing an opponent in a tournament in Japan, but we never see the incident which destroys his career. Instead, he goes on TV back in Lithuania explaining that it was all a terrible accident which he regrets, but sadly that doesn’t seem to cut any ice.
Discussing the situation with his coach (Marius Misiūnas), he resolves to make the best of the situation by opening his own gym; his coach, however, isn’t sure that Osvald has what it takes and suggests he work at the gym as an assistant to see if he has a feel for coaching. Among Osvald’s new kickboxing charges is the promising Angelika (Samantha Drilingate), who he helps to learn how to defend herself in the ring when she comes in one day with a massive torso bruise from a bar fight that got out of hand.
He and coach later console her after she has lost a professional fight, but Osvald loses his job when the girl’s mother , horrified that “this abuser” is helping to train her daughter, threatens to place her in another gym.
Meanwhile, his restaurateur friend Ju-Long (Jian Huang from Old Fox, Hsaio Ya-chuan, 2023; Sheep Without a Shepherd, Sam Quah, 2019; Life of Pi, Ang Lee, 2012), a Taiwanese immigrant along with his extended family, including his sister Huan (Sonia Yuan from Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021) has problems of his own. He has borrowed money from gangsters, and is now being forced to supply them with a stream of women. He tries to carry on life in the restaurant as normal, performing karaoke at the birthday party of his ageing mum (Lu Yi-ching from Mongrel, Chiang Wei-liang, 2024), but the situation is catching up with him.
One night, Ju-Long comes in to a room and, turning on the light, finds a girl wandering in a drug-induced haze with blood dripping down her legs. We see something of this in near-darkness before he enters and turns on the light: an unforgettable, if visually hard to make out, image.
Elsewhere, Osvald attends a therapy class where people sit around in a circle not unlike the stereotype of an AA meeting; and on one occasion participate in a group exercise where they bump into each other but are exhorted to “whatever happens, keep moving forward.”
Through the class, he meets Skiaste (Severija Janusauskaite), who tells him she is struggling with the feeling of losing her identity. Walking with her in an underpass, he tells her he’s feeling the same way. She is constantly hanging out at a private swimming pool with a Russian gangster (Vaidotas Martinaitis), and probably way out of Osvald’s league (except in the sense that, perhaps, both their lives are messed up and neither of them knows who they are any more. She performs with a band in a venue resembling a pole dancing club and invites him along. Later he will give her flowers and propose to her, and she will reject him.
The tapestry of these lives conjures a culture in crisis, where people are in thrall to the media (as can equally be observed in the UK) yet have lost the sense of who they as individuals are or might be. Osvald and Skiaste’s lives contrast with Ju-Long’s equally grim immigrant experience; with his dream of the restaurant in ruins, he wonders what on Earth he left Taiwan for.
Osvald finds and cares for an abandoned dog, which takes to him, but even the simple relationship of caring of a pet can’t survive the harsh reality in which he is himself now living.
The second film I’ve seen at this year’s PÖFF, this would make for a fascinating double bill with the first one, Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi, 2025). Both are films about second chances, but that film is a lot more optimistic than this one. If circumstances in both films stem from past mistakes, Mo Papa’s protagonists somehow manage to keep moving forward in challenging circumstances in a way that their counterparts in China Sea can’t quite manage.
Both films have about them what I can only describes as a sense of Baltic unease. Both have about them the sense of ordinary people falling prey to gangsters – a theme foregrounded more in China Sea than in the other. It makes you wonder if something is happening in the Baltic States which film makers are trying to express. (Clearly something IS happening: Russia is attacking / bullying Ukraine: perhaps both these films are expressing something of the unease of that situation in the region. Or, perhaps I’m completely barking up the wrong tree here.)
Anyway, one wonders if this is developing into some sort of regional genre (a dodgy argument to make on the backs of two films, I know, but we shall see); character studies of individuals trying to make their way in the world in difficult of impossible circumstances.
Be all that as it may, China Sea remains very much its own film and is profoundly moving, presenting as it does a terrifying portrait of a society where the floating corpse of a woman can leak blood into the water in a swimming pool and it feels like an insignificant event at which you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
China Sea premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: