The Beautiful Story of a Small Potato

A beautifully calibrated study of an "everyday hero" that avoids political posturing and the usual cliches, To Live and Die in Ordos is a major bounceback by director Ning Ying, now in her mid-50s, after first making her name 20 years ago with the wry, almost documentary-like  For Fun and  On the Beat . The film is as self-effacing as its main character, a detective in the bleak but coal-rich municipality of Ordos, Inner Mongolia , whose supposedly stainless reputation is investigated by a journalist after his sudden death. The film is neither a personal drama with any sudden revelations nor a commissioned hagiography; instead, it\'s a character study of a socially responsible cop in a get-rich-quick bordertown whose life represents the social and ethical tensions which China has been experiencing during the past decade or so.

Teaming again with her elder sister, scriptwriter Ning Dai , Ning works within a well-established genre in Mainland cinema - the socio-political biopic - but reinvents it in a way that makes involving cinema from the plodding career of a rather unremarkable character. Much of the film\'s success is due to lead actor Wang Jingchun (who played the patient father in Wang Xiaoshuai\'s 11 Flowers , 2011): he not only looks like the real character on whom the movie is based but also anchors the whole film with an engrossing, very physical performance of contained energy. Wang\'s policeman is a former high-school teacher whose hero is Sherlock Holmes and who believes crimes (and even social disputes) can be solved by rational, unemotional reasoning; to the chagrin of his wife and son, he puts his work above all else and fills copious diaries with his thoughts and methodical research.

Aside from the actors\' performances, the film\'s success is also due to Ning Dai\'s screenplay, which uses the drama of individual, real-life murder cases (and especially the brutal, unsolved Case 129 that dogs the policeman to his grave) to bind together what would otherwise be just a series of interviews. The movie flows remarkably smoothly, thanks to its technical packaging, with smooth editing by Jia Cuiping and widescreen photography by American Sean O\'Dea that catches the chilly light and vast wintry landscape of central Inner Mongolia. The closing credits contain pictures of the real people and their names, and the real-life journalist Tang Ji (on whom the film\'s reporter is based) can be seen in a small role as an editor-in-chief.