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Rickshaw Boy
Shanghai Star. 2004-08-05
Director: Zifeng Ling
Starring: Zhang Fengyi, Siqin Gaowa, Yin Xin, Li Tang
"Rickshaw Boy", from Lao She's novel "Luotuo (Camel) "Xiangzi", was
recognized as a milestone in Chinese cinema when it was released to
international acclaim in 1982. Its director Zifeng Ling (1917-99) was a
member of China's Third Generation (1949-78) of film makers and like the
directors who came after him - especially the so-called "New Wave" Fifth
Generation (1983-89) - he had to tread carefully when choosing or adapting
screenplays.
However, "Rickshaw Boy", a hard-edged and beautiful movie, would not have
troubled the Party censors, especially with its graphic depiction of life in prerevolutionary Beijing. The Chinese critics who once assailed movies by "New
Wave" director Zhang Yimou as being "untrue to history", would have had no
such trouble with Zifeng Ling's film.
But neither is "Rickshaw Boy" an exercise in "socialist realist" propaganda. It
tells the all-too-real story of Xiangzi (Zhang Fengyi), an athletic, boyish
rickshaw puller who is struggling to find financial security through owning his
own rickshaw but who encounters one disaster after another.
The first setback comes when he is abducted by soldiers who are fighting (or
looting) for one of the warlords running Beijing in the 1920s and his rickshaw
is destroyed. Xiangzi manages to get back to Beijing, returns to a former job
with a rickshaw rental agency and settles down with the other pullers. He is
hard-working, doesn't drink, smoke or gamble and finds he has attracted the
eye of Huniu (Siqin Gaowa), the boss's daughter.
She is older and smarter than Xiangzi but he isn't keen on marrying anybody
anyway as it would interfere with his plans for saving to buy a rickshaw of his
own. In one of the movie's few comic scenes, Huniu seduces Xiangzi after
getting him drunk - the poor bloke has never had a drink in his life before but she doesn't get him to the altar because he runs away to work as a
rickshaw puller for a scholar, Mr Cao (Li Tang).
Not deterred, Huniu tracks him down and tricks the now despairing Xiangzi
into marriage by pretending to be pregnant. Once married to the resourceful
Huniu, Xiangzi resumes the quest to buy his own rickshaw and seems
content with life, especially when told that he really is about to become a
father.
However, that is about as good as it gets for Xiangzi in the ruthless dog-eatdog world of Beijing in the 1920s. The ensuing series of tragedies that batter
him would break a lesser man but Xiangzi, although constantly beaten down,
always manages to rise again.
The movie reflects the writing of Lao She (1899-1966) in showing that the
lives of the poverty-stricken rickshaw pullers and the desperate plight of the
jobless in Beijing in the 1920s and 1930s are a mirror image of the world of
those who are oppressing them. The poor are shown turning on one another
and tormenting anyone less fortunate than themselves. All social interaction
in the movie and book are based on power relationships shaped by the need
for money.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the slowly growing love affair
between Xiangzi and Xiao Fuzi (Yin Xin), a young woman struggling to
support her two little brothers after her drunken father sold her in marriage to
a husband who quickly deserted her.
She lives in the same hutong as Xiangzi and is persecuted by the other
residents when she is forced to work as a prostitute to earn money to buy
food. "We sell our sweat," an old rickshaw puller tells Xiangzi, "and our
women have to sell their bodies."
Xiangzi is also in trouble for working for Cao. A book Cao has written has
upset whatever regime was running Beijing at the time and government
agents are tracking him. One bursts into Xiangzi's hutong, robs him of all his
savings at gunpoint and, once again, his chance of owning a rickshaw
vanishes.
As played by Zhang Fengyi ("Farewell My Concubine"), Xiangzi is a study in
cheerful, dogged determination. The pace of the movie matches the fast
jogging of the rickshaw pullers through the city's streets and markets and the
cinematography around Beijing in all seasons of the year is first-class. This is
another reason to see the movie, especially as many of the hutong shown
around the city have fallen to "progress" in the 22 years since it was made.
In his book, Lao She ("Teahouse", "Crescent Moon", "The Yellow Storm" and
a hundred other stories) was writing about another time of absolute social
immobility in China, when society victimized its own children and when the
victims could not see any way out of the poverty trap they were in.
When writing about the rickshaw pullers, Lao She said: "Because it never
occurred to them to stand together, each went his own way; each man's
hopes and exertions obscured his vision." However, Fate's continuous rain of
blows on Xiangzi are due to something else. Xiangzi is, Lao She wrote, "a
ghost caught in individualism's blind alley".
In 1945, Lao She's book was given a happy ending and, as a result, became
a best-seller in the US. The real-life ending for Lao She was anything but
happy. One of China's greatest modern writers, he was persecuted to death
by red guards in the early months of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).
Barry Porter
Taking Lives
Director: D.J. Caruso
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Angelina Jolie
This moodily atmospheric movie, set in Montreal, demonstrates how
thoroughly the serial-killer genre has developed an autonomous tradition,
now essentially separated from the more general category of crime drama.
Where crime movies tend to emphasize action, economic motives and the
complex ethics of policing, the essential features of the serial-killer subspecies are the peculiar intimacy between investigator and murderer, the
attendant psychological pressures and confusions this invokes in the (usually
socially aloof or isolated) investigator, the ambiguities and reversals between
hunter and hunted and a slow claustrophobic absorption into psychological
depths, with special reference to unhealed childhood wounds.
David Fincher's classic "Seven" (1995) provided the basic model for many of
these films, and "Taking Lives" is no exception in this respect.
While falling far short of Fincher's masterpiece, "Taking Lives" starts well,
looks great, delivers a reasonable original mode of murderous criminality
(serial identity stealing or "life-jacking - although Gregory Hoblit's
supernaturally-skewed "Fallen" did this better). Ethan Hawke is suitably
creepy and Angelina Jolie gives perhaps her best performance to date as
Special Agent Illeana Scott, the FBI profiler assigned to the case.
Nevertheless, the movie ultimately disappoints, let down by a pedestrian
script and an excess of genre cliche. The twists and turns in the plot become
increasingly implausible and by the end it is unlikely many viewers will still be
full engaged in the overwrought showdown. Such bonuses as a cameo
appearance by Kiefer Sutherland and a Philip Glass score are unable to
distract from the triumph of genre-inertia over inspiration.
Nick Land
Copyright by Shanghai Star.