Chinese Boxes (1984) User Reviews

Potential

[gavin6942 · 6/10 · 2 July 2013]

An American (Will Patton) in West Berlin finds himself caught up in murder and intrigue after his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter is found dead in his room.

If you did not know, Chinese boxes are a set of boxes of graduated size, each fitting inside the next larger box. You know, kind of like those Russian dolls. Does this accurately describe this film? Well, sort of.

There is definitely a mystery, and it is certainly complex. You will wonder why customs agents are acting like the CIA, and the idea that Berlin is a "black hole" where everything can get in and nothing can get out. The very concept is interesting, especially given that Berlin at the time was the dead center of where East meets West...

This is one odd movie

[ionamay48 · 12 January 2004]

I watched this fairly carefully the first time through, and I must admit, I had a devil of a time tryig to figure out what it was about! The excellent photo-play and first class music score kept my interest, as well as the interesting and excellent cast. The camera shots are very well done and use very interesting subject matter. The music is unique and very well thought out. Lots of ambience in this one. Maybe not the greatest budget- but since when did a large budget guarantee a good movie? this is a cult movie to be sure, and will take numerous viewing for the gist of the plot to really show itself, as there is no telegraphing of any pertinent info about the plot...you must deduce a lot about what is going on...making it intellectually stimulating.Beate Jensen (plays Donna) is particularly interesting and a very fine actress. All in all I would recommend this as a more cerebral film of intrigue and mystery. See what you think! If you can find it that is!

Low-budget film?

[bato-2 · 8/10 · 20 February 1999]

I don´t know..... This movie doesn´t seem to have much money involved in it. You can tell that by the obvious recorded voices and the cheap sound effects, not to mention that awkward illumination. But anyway, the plot has nothing else to offer and nobody seems to know about this movie!!!! Well, perhaps the acting could save this movie, perhaps not. Watch it at your own decision.

Treats genre expectations with enjoyable minimalism

[philosopherjack · 19 August 2022]

In a way, the title of Christopher Petit's Chinese Boxes sums up the odd feeling of lost-in-time absence that permeates the movie, not just through the structural clue it contains (that one layer of apparent explanation will be forcibly removed to reveal another, and so on) but also through the evocation of China as abstract exoticism, not then seeming relevant to any immediate economic conversation. Marsh (Will Patton), an American in a still-partitioned Berlin, is the main inadvertent box-opener: a dead business associate leading to a teenage girl overdosing in his apartment, leading to a mysterious American called Harwood who says he's a customs agent (Robbie Coltrane) but doesn't act like it, to mysterious assignments apparently connected to drug trafficking, and to further killings and revelations. The film treats genre expectations with enjoyable minimalism, depicting a car crash simply by cutting to the stunned passengers inside the upside-down car, dispensing with scenes of gun- and fist-play so glancingly that they hardly register at all, and allowing Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" (maybe a too-obvious choice) to make some meaningful-seeming dialogue largely unintelligible; much the same goes for the film's depiction of Berlin, predominantly consisting of anonymous locations that might be anywhere. It's still a resonant choice though, with Harwood's primary concern turning out not to be drugs at all but rather the prospects for increased commerce between East and West; he even presciently anticipates the possibility of reunification (as a matter of economic if not political logic). The choice of aspect ratio reinforces the sense of "boxiness" and confinement, of things perpetually on the verge of inwardly collapsing. A key character's final rejection of a free ticket out, finding the prospect of leaving Berlin unimaginable, underlines all that the movie leaves untapped, a sense of further boxes (or of entire sets of boxes) not yet opened, or even dreamed of.