To call “Aftershock” a melodrama doesn’t really do it justice. Shortly after Feng Xiaogang’s film begins, a woman whose husband has just died in the devastating 1976 Tangshan earthquake looks up and screams: “God! You bastard!” And things go downhill from there. Before you know it, she has a Sophie’s choice to make involving her two trapped children and a concrete slab.
These scenes, including a highly effective rendering of the earthquake, which killed an estimated 240,000 people, are dispatched quickly. But the pain is just beginning. Still to come are an adoption, an unexpected pregnancy, terminal illness, two amputations, three emotional reunions, four abandonments and more than 30 years of exquisite suffering, guilt and resentment, until a redemptive finale brought about by — it’s almost too good to be true — the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
The surprise is that while you’re aware that “Aftershock” is extracting tears with a sledgehammer, it doesn’t necessarily feel like abuse; it’s easy to let yourself go along with it. A lot of Chinese moviegoers did: “Aftershock” (the original title translates as “The Tangshan Earthquake”) is the highest-grossing domestic film in China’s history, its $100 million take since its release in July ranking it ahead of “The Founding of a Republic,” though still behind “Avatar.”
Mr. Feng, director of the romantic caper “A World Without Thieves” and the romantic comedy “If You Are the One” (No. 3 in that box office ranking), has been called the Spielberg of China. In “Aftershock” the comparison makes sense in terms beyond commercial success. He somehow manages to mitigate the worst excesses of Su Xiaowei’s script. The film may be a blunt instrument , but it’s rarely maudlin — the exception being the performance of Mr. Feng’s wife, Fan Xu, as the long-suffering mother -and is, on occasion, quite moving. (Western viewers will still find some of the notions about family guilt to be over the top , but then they’re not accustomed to presumptive filial piety and a one-child policy.)