Twelve Citizens (Ang Xu, 2014): China

Reviewed by e Howard Green.  Viewed at the Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, February 4th

Billed as a version of the famous Henry Fonda movie, 12 Angry Men,  the Chinese film drama 12 Citizens takes the jury room process into a differing culture with dramatic results.  Here we see “jurors” from different socioeconomic backgrounds revealing their prejudices and feelings while debating the guilt or innocence of a rich young adopted man accused of murder of his birth father.

The opening scenes (act one) depict a University mock courtroom and trial.  We are shown brief segments representing the testimony of key witnesses, which become subject of debate later.   The “judge” charges the 12 citizens to come back with an unanimous decision, but not too quickly.

This has set up a natural conflict for the long second act, set in an over-sized industrial warehouse, decorated mostly with a table and 12 chairs.  The sparsity of visual distractions forces the viewer to focus on the players, the 12 personalities from vastly different backgrounds, as becomes evident by their approaches to justification of their viewpoints as to guilt or innocence.

Here the director effectively uses music, sound effects like a thunder storm, his camera angles and closeups to study the faces, positioning and placement of the players.  Some overhead long shots provide a different perspective, but mostly we are at eye level with the participants.  We can almost feel the emotions being richly expressed by the actors.

Don’t get up too quickly at the end.  Spoiler alert: there is are a few key frames at the end you won’t want to miss.

There are some elements that were hard to believe, for this Western viewer, that the concept of preponderance of evidence and presumption of innocence exist in Chinese justice system,  It seemed that they were introduced in the film as propaganda in an effort to show that democratic principles such as the “rights of man” exist in that society.