Somewhere in the land of worn-out metaphors, there’s a drawer overflowing with love letters from all the filmmakers who ever thought to make cinema of the making of cinema.
But it feels inadequate to file Zhang Yimou’s “One Second” alongside those when it is the most direct and heartfelt valentine to the medium the revered Fifth Generation filmmaker has ever composed — even though, in the four decades between his 1981 debut “Red Sorghum” and this year’s “Cliff Walkers,” he has rarely made a film that could be considered anything but.This time, in language as simple and lovely as a close-up on Liu Haocun’s grimy, radiant face and in sentences made from strips of sticky celluloid glinting in a projector’s glare as they dry, cinema has written back.
“One Second” is not just about the magic of the movies, it’s about their resilience, and so
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