Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Johnny Ma’s debut Old Stone gives away several of its major plot points in the first three minutes. Opening on the present, we see taxi driver Lao Shi (Chen Gang) tailing a motorcyclist with a bandaged head. The focused Shi barely listens to a news story over the radio about an exhausted taxi driver accidentally hitting a pedestrian the night before and trying to cover up the accident by backing over the body again. It’s not as if Shi needs to imagine how those events unfolded, though, because, after the title card, Old Stone takes us three months back to the accident that brought Shi and the motorcyclist Li Jiang (Zebin Zhang) together. By virtue of this opening sequence, some of the suspense surrounding Jiang’s fate after the accident is negated, but the film isn’t so much about the mere events of his survival and recovery process but the emotional toll they wreak on Lao Shi.
Unlike the incident on the radio, Shi is driving a drunken passenger who grabs at the wheel when he accidentally hits Jiang. And, instead of calling the police and leaving the scene, he stays and takes his victim to the hospital himself. Unfortunately, that means that, through the logic of Chinese healthcare, he is responsible for all the medical bills. And there are plenty, considering Jiang is in a coma. What Ma sets up here is a simple tale of how doing the right thing can ruin your life in a callous society. Numerous times, everyone from his wife to his pro bono lawyer tell Shi that it would have been better if the victim had simply died at the scene. His wife even withdraws all of the money in their bank account so that he can’t continue paying the hospital bills. His own family still needs to survive, too.
Even Jiang’s family, who Shi contacts with the information he steals from the police, lament the fact that they can’t receive Jiang’s life insurance since he is still alive. Up to that point, Shi had been completely selfless, paying his bills and visiting Jiang in the ICU. There’s a real sense that, even though his liability is a pointed flaw in the system, Shi feels real guilt and the burden to care for Jiang when his family is so far away. His attempt to kill Jiang by unplugging his life support machine is arguably attempted murder committed to help Jiang’s family just as much as to help himself. But it doesn’t work, and Jiang wakes up instead. Medical bills continue to pile up – still Shi’s responsibility – even as Jiang goes back to work.
What’s most interesting in Old Stone is witnessing how such a well-intentioned man can be driven to real violence by impersonal bureaucracy. And while the story itself bears few surprise twists, given its framing, it’s Chen’s measured performance as Shi that ties the film together. Ma begins the film with a real distance between the camera and its subjects, but as he delves deeper into the character of Shi, Old Stone becomes a psychological thriller in the noir vein, playing up Shi’s moral ambiguity to great effect.
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