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Travelers arriving. Travelers departing. This is what Life on a String is about. This is what life is about.Life on a String, an early film by Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell My Concubine, is based on a story by Tiesheng Shi about two blind people, a singer/saint referred to as Old Master and his young apprentice Shitou. Old Master learned when he was a small boy that following the breaking of 1,000 strings on his banjo, his sight will be restored. This film is about his quest. It is essentially a meditation on vision and blindness, silence and song, and life and death. It is a serene, touching, and beautiful film, but not for the attention-span challenged.Old Master (Liu Zhongyuan), leads his blind apprentice Shitou (Huang Lei) on the road through an awe-inspiring landscape of mountains and rivers in Western China. Old Master is frail and counts the days when the final string will be broken and Shitou will take his place. His student, however, wants a different type of life. He wants romance and when he meets and falls in love with a young villager (Xu Qing), he goes against his master's wishes to be with her.Life on a String is saturated with wondrous folk music from Chinese composer Xiao-Song Qu. Old Master sings in a deep, melodious, and powerful voice as he entertains amazed villagers by firelight. Nearing the end of his life, he continues to play his strings earnestly to reach his goal. His songs have the power to stop warring groups and turn them toward peace (Old Master is much needed today in the Middle East).The striking visual power of the film is balanced by fine characterizations and the relationship between Shitou and Lanxiu has remarkable innocence and chemistry though I was unclear about why their relationship ended the way it did.Both Old Master and Shitou question their blindness. Throughout their journey, the master questions whether it was worth sixty years of waiting to be able to see. "Is the world I'm going to see, the same as the world inside of me? "Is it worth it", he asks himself. And he answers, "It is not worth it…It is worth it".Both are reconciled to their fate in a final luminous scene of acceptance. After a conversation with the God of Death, Old Master sings to assembled villages under the firelight, "One day", he sings, "all of us will sing, no more sadness, no more tears. We will all lift our voices and sing for joy". For me, this is one of the most uplifting moments in all of cinema.Watching Life on a String is like bathing in sunlight. I felt such a tremendous sense of calm and longing for the infinite that I ended up watching it three times, mesmerized, with an enhanced spiritual feeling each time. I may not watch any more movies, just keep watching this one each week until I die.The God of Death says that life is a game in which some play better than others.Let the good times roll.
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