Zhang Yang is a talented film-maker. As anyone familiar with his early work can attest, he has a flair for mixing a serious subject matter with humour that is quite unparallelled amongst contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese film-makers, except perhaps Edward Yang. He makes the most out of seemingly little stories, specialising in a kind of family drama which is warm and loving without ever getting sentimental.

"Quitting" is another family drama for Zhang, but not quite of his customary charm. Although the director again explores the subject matter he handled so brilliantly in his previous films (tradition versus modernity), the tone of his latest film is markedly different from that of its predecessors. It is darker. Less funny, too.

"Quitting" is a film registration of a play Zhang recently directed. And not just any play, but one based on a true story in which the characters (several of whom had no acting experience prior to being in the play) play themselves. The lead actor and main character is Jia Hongsheng, star of such arthouse hits as "Frozen" and "Suzhou River," and the story told is that of the real-life heroin addiction which kept Jia off the stage for a few years.

Now I know what you're thinking - a Chinese HEROIN drama? Well, yes and no. To the extent that "Quitting" deals with the effects of heroin on Jia's life, it can indeed be said to constitute a heroin movie. However, there is preciously little heroin in it. Over the 118 minutes that the film lasts, Jia is seen snorting and smoking horse just once, and there is nothing but a close-up of his trembling fingers to indicate that he is going through withdrawal. It is a remarkably clean film, with none of the nasty shootings-up, trippy hallucinations or gruesome withdrawal scenes that characterise films such as "Requiem for a Dream," "Trainspotting" or "Christiane F."

Depending on your point of view, the lack of drugs in the film can be either a good or a bad thing. For my part, I regret there not being more drugs in it, as they would have given the film an edge which is now wholly absent. As it is, the extent to which drugs rule Jia's life is never convincingly conveyed, and the film exudes a sterility that is quite at odds with the supposed intensity of Jia's addiction.

It is fair to say that "Quitting" is not so much a drug flick as an unusual family drama which just happens to include a few drugs. When the story opens, old Mr and Mrs Jia, who have just retired, move in with their son, reports of whose decline have filtered through to their remote Southern home. It is quickly established that the parents are old-fashioned "peasants" who wash with lard soap, while their son, a hotshot actor who has starred in several television series, has become a modern citizen of hip and trendy Beijing. Jia obviously looks down upon his parents, and is so afraid they will tarnish his "cool" image that he forces his father to wear one of his own pairs of jeans, even though they are obviously a few sizes too small. Not wishing to alienate their troubled son, the parents put up with his increasingly outrageous demands. They never stand up to him until it is clear that he is not just an inconsiderate junkie, but a schizophrenic one at that, at which point they have him admitted to a lunatic asylum. In the asylum, Jia learns that he is not in fact John Lennon's son (which he has believed until then), and comes to the conclusion that acting might not be the shallow, objectionable activity he once thought it was.

The key to the film is the relationship between Jia and his father, who, judging from some comments made in the film, is a real-life actor, too. It is a fascinating relationship in that the father, far from a powerful leader, has an addictive personality, too, a fact Jia is not above using in his more sadistic moods: "Don't forget you've been a drunk all your life. You're not qualified to take care of me, understand?"

There are some painful scenes in "Quitting," notably in relation to Jia's overbearing manner to his father. For some reason, though, the drama never really gets off the ground. While it is interesting to watch Jia's descent into schizophrenia, one never really feels for him, largely because he is an inconsiderate bastard and partly because his motives remain vague. It is never demonstrated why Jia feels as alienated as he does, nor why he sacrifices an apparently successful career for a vegetable-like existence in which the only thing he does is listen to (unheard) Beatles albums. He remains a distant, unemotional figure whose ultimate redemption leaves the viewer cold, even if Zhang does his best to dish it up in a nice, metaphorical way. Moreover, the final lesson, namely that people of different generations and different persuasions can learn how to live together peacefully, has been taught with greater poignancy elsewhere.

For a large part, the lack of involving drama can be blamed on the ambitious structure of the film. As I explained before, "Quitting" is a registration of a play. There are a few scenes which were shot outside (notably Beijing's Ritan Park), but the lion's share of the film was shot within the confines of a single staged set, a fact Zhang stresses by occasionally moving his camera away from his actors to reveal the stage. While there are no distracting factors such as applause (the film was clearly shot without an audience), Zhang's insistence on literally putting the viewer at a distance during moments of emotional intensity is disturbing enough to prevent the viewer from getting drawn into the story.

Alienation tactics aside, "Quitting" suffers from an exaggerated cleanliness. With his parents' lenient attitude towards his incessant pressing for money and his own supposed acting fortune, it is of course conceivable that Jia never has to go out and rob old ladies or prostitute himself in order to get his fix, but somehow his life as an addict seems too "easy," too sterile. In my opinion, a peak at the squalor of his junkie existence would have heightened the intensity of the film, rendering it both more shocking and more effective.

In a nutshell, "Quitting" is an interesting experiment which unfortunately suffers from its own experimentalism. It certainly merits viewing, but if you want to see what Zhang is really capable of, rent "Shower" or "Spicy Love Soup." They may be less ambitious than "Quitting," but their warmth is definitely preferable to the clinical cold that pervades Zhang's latest.

BREVE TRAVERSEE (Catherine Breillat, 2001)