I Am Not Madame Bovary

I Am Not Madame Bovary (Chinese: Wo Bu Shi Pan Jinlian) (2016) Director: Xiaogang Feng First Seen: 1/24/25 6/10 Stars

Wronged gal seeks revenge in circles and rectangles.

Tale that spans decades- side plots, excess characters, much too long and gimmicky!

An underdog tale told with charm, humor, panache, and a poignant end.

One versus corrupt regime, filmed amidst a lush China!

#Somonka #PoemReview

A traditional poem taking two stances in two stanzas. In fact, it's basically two tankas written as two love letters to each other (one tanka per love letter). This form usually demands two authors, but it is possible to have a poet take on two personas.

This is a fun if somewhat lengthy satirical window (literally) into Chinese bureaucracy and one crazed woman's battle against it.

Full of fun characters and quirky scenes. Fan Bingbing is superb and unrecognisable as the loony but determined hero.

Worth the watch.

Bingbing Fan is on a quest for justice. She and her husband got a divorce so they could get a better apartment, but after the divorce, he married someone else. So she wants the divorce overturned, so they can be married again, whereupon she will sue for a divorce.

This confuses the local judiciary, the police department and the entire civil government up to the level of provincial governor -- goodness knows, it confused me -- and gets a review at the national level in Beijing, where the decisions are sustained. This happens for ten years in a row, while judges, majors and even governors lose their jobs, because this crazy woman cannot be stopped.

It's a fine satire of the effects of one determined person on a massive bureaucracy, as various people try to deal with her by varying means. While I found several stretches a bit slow, perhaps this is because in the details of general and particular points to make fun of, the particular points of Chinese government elude me. Even with that in mind, there are lots of good laughs, and some interesting playing around with mattes: the provincial scenes are shown through a circular matte, showing off the squarish architecture, and the Beijing scenes are shown through a small, rectangular matte, showing off the round archways. I think this is supposed to emphasize the difference way that local and national governments look at things. If so, it is a very nice conceit.

Possibly the most daring artistic attempt from Feng Xiaogang, the film tells the story of a peasant woman's petition from the countryside to Beijing because she felt that her divorce was unfair, and differentiate the local and central scenes with a round black and a square black frame respectively. The audience is separated from means of stage play, and the circle frame is wrapped by the square then, and they finally disappears. However, Zhang Yimou's classic "The Story of Qiu Ju" is in the forefront, and Liu Zhenyun's script and even Fan Bingbing's performance limit the result. The film matches Chinese mainstream and overly beautify the from-top-to-bottom bureaucratic culture.

Every man is a good actor. But the director is not good enough, especially this kind of novel garbage picture. The story of the whole film is to develop in the direction of black satire, but because of commercial considerations, dare not say very thoroughly. Only Mayor Ma said something about the substance.