Bystanders to Chinas Transition

10 de diciembre de 2010 - 08:28

The Beijing-born, New York-based filmmaker Miao Wang follows three cabbies around her old hometown in the picturesque documentary “Beijing Taxi,” filmed over several years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The cabbies have interesting and poignant things to say about being left behind in China’s rush to modernize, and Ms. Wang; her directors of photography, Ian Vollmer and Sean Price Williams; and her editor, Sikay Tang, have produced an attractive and seamless set of images of working-class Chinese life. (The chronology gets a little herky-jerky, with major changes in the drivers’ lives happening entirely off screen.)
The film works quite well as a melancholy travelogue — an elevated version of something you might see on cable television — but its aspirations for depth of feeling or more profound social commentary aren’t quite realized. We learn a fair bit about the taxi drivers’ lives without really being drawn into them, and the film’s observations on Chinese society and its modern history are elegantly framed but are nothing you haven’t seen already, possibly in upscale travel magazines.

You suspect that Ms. Wang wanted to fit in everything she was seeing: forced relocations, the health system, Olympics propaganda, paunchy foreign men dancing with young Chinese women, and on and on. Her best material involves a headstrong female driver in her mid-30s, Wei Caixia, who is young by Western standards but close to being over the hill in Beijing. When she shows her wedding pictures to a group of women in their 20s, their disbelief and casual rudeness — “Not as pretty as the old days” — says more than any number of shots of Beijing streets and landmarks flowing by.

Bystanders to Chinas Transition

0 comentarios

Bystanders to Chinas Transition