Meng ying tong nian

Jiang Xian uses the complex backstory of Ling Ling and Mao Daobing to study Mao's "cultural revolution" (1966-1976) at the village level. The film has the elements and pace of Chinese opera and so appears slow and sometimes sentimental to the foreign viewer. But the movie provides a window onto contemporary life in China, with its focus upon villagers in the city, the consuming quality of subsistence--daily struggle, family and local cruelties--and the appeal of movies as escape, fantasy, and, ultimately, as source of community. This last is the most radical element in the film, for it suggests the modern--and universal--experience of culture will replace the insular Chinese traditions. The child actors are particularly fine.

What I love about Chinese movies is they know how to make dramas interesting, most dramas are eather boring or melancholy, but the Chinese movies really know how to make it exiting.

A young water delivery man is out of no reason hit by a brick from a mute woman. During the police investigation the woman ask the man to go to her home and feed her fish. When he is there he sees old movies, then he read her diary that reveals from her child hood to teenage and to his surprise a part of his own childhood in her diary, could they have been connected in the past?

Not only do the movie show a good story but also love for movies as some scenes show people's fantasies while in the theatre. It's a 7/10.

Maybe it was because I was on a flight from Beijing where I fell in love with the country and the city, or maybe because I compared it to the other Chinese film they showed on the plane (it was horrible). Anyway, I loved this movie. In contrast to most American movies I too often see, this film had a story that captured you from the start, and never let you go. Add to this clever kid actors performing and acting their age (unlike 30-year old Dakotas or Haley Joels), and otherwise good performing all the way. No explosions, car chases or guns being fired, but more capturing and exciting than most films containing those types of elements. I can't wait until I get to see the next movie with this director, these actors or actually anything with anyone involved in the making of if this movie. Did I mention that the photography/scenery is stunning?

Electric Shadows (2005)

With sweeping camera-work, beautiful scenery in several locations in China, and a heartwarming and heartbreaking story of two children trying to make their lives make sense amidst lots of upheaval, "Electric Shadows" makes a great first impression. For movie lovers it works intrinsically, and then it adds another compelling layer--the title refers to movies themselves, and there is scene after scene of makeshift outdoor theaters and crowds of people watching domestic films. It's a highly romanticized bowing down to the art form.

It's also an attractive way to see the changing currents in Chinese politics, as seen by the common people in the last forty or so years as the Cultural Revolution went through its paces. The events on and off screen echo, with almost storybook precision, the main moods and events of those times.

I found all of this stunning at first, and then I started to get little hints that it was all a bit obvious, and then, as the plot continued to play with both the troubles of these cute kids growing up and with the changing tastes and types of movies shown, I grew restless and irritated. And to grow irritated at such a finely made love story is troubling all by itself.

The ability to make a superb looking movie these days is within reach of anyone with a budget. There is no sense that it takes a hugely specialized set of talented technicians and actors to pull it off, as was far more true fifty or even thirty years ago. And the down side to that rears its gnarly head here--this is a movie that should have done more and said more.

"Electric Shadows" plays so loosely with clichés of meaning and clichés of beauty, it ends up being the very thing it most wants to avoid. A sensation. A glimmer on a flat screen, an electric shadow. The magic is only in the surface, and the more beautiful and compelling it seems to be the more you want it to dig in and go somewhere with sincerity and depth.

ELECTRIC SHADOWS is such a little treasure that I want to plug it in to every film lover I know. The comparison to Italy's "Cinema Paradiso" is apt in the most important way because it's all about how movies enrich the life of a child. In other ways, the film is so vastly different from writer/director Giuseppi Tornatore's lovely work, which is quintessentially Italian: big with emotions, architecture, color, performance, length and budget. In this short and seemingly simple Chinese film, lack is everywhere, from the missing father to the lives these characters lead: where they live and work, what they have to eat and how they get around (the bus in which sister escorts her baby brother is a perfect case in point).

Yet thanks to a style that is warm, honest, rich and--especially--gentle, a story full of quite awful happenings is told in such a way that whatever director/co-writer Jiang Xiao offers us, including some pretty heavy coincidence, we gratefully accept because all of it works beautifully toward her goal of celebrating film, family and friendship. Her achievement is all the more surprising because the movie--her first, and filmed, it would appear, on an awfully small budget--starts out simply and charmingly then quietly builds until it reaches a conclusion that ties everything together without a whiff of heavy-handed melodrama or overkill. In the Special Features, the director explains her purpose, how she came to film-making, and her hope to do something worthy for the major anniversary of Chinese film. I can't imagine a better gift to the country, its growing film industry, or the widening world of international film lovers. Enjoy!