By the time you read this, Donald Trump may already have announced our withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement. Last week the New York Times reported that the president, prodded by his senior adviser Steve Bannon and the conservative Institute for Energy Research, plans to issue an executive order scrapping the Obama administration’s regulations on coal-burning power plants, a building block to the Paris agreement. There’s a special place in hell for those who play political games with the fate of humanity—as Chinese director-cinematographer Zhao Liang might attest. His 2015 feature Behemoth, screening this week at Facets Cinematheque, invokes Dante’s Inferno as a metaphor for the human and ecological ravages of coal mining and other industries in Inner Mongolia. Straddling the line between art film and documentary, Behemoth takes as its ostensible subject the pollution of the planet—but it also explores the pollution of the soul.
Not surprisingly, Behemoth got a cold welcome in China, the world’s worst polluter, where it has barely been screened at all. Interviewed by Slant, Zhao claimed that the film was disappeared from the Chinese Internet after being chosen to compete at the Venice film festival, and that none of the 100-odd Chinese reporters at the festival interviewed him. Behemoth implicates every one of us in the fossil-fuel economy—there’s a reason the guide carries a mirror on his back—and if Dante was correct, we can look forward to eternal damnation in the fourth circle, where the greedy drag heavy weights around. But farther down lies the eighth circle, offering even greater torments for the Trumps and Bannons of the world: the evil counselors, whose souls are wrapped in flames; the sowers of discord, who are constantly mutilated by a sword-wielding demon; and the falsifiers, who are consumed by pestilence and frenziedly claw off their own scabs. That’s why they call it a comedy. v
Directed by Zhao Liang
