Exposing Chinese Barbarism
Filed under: Asia
The New Yorker's review of the 2006 film Blind Mountain, currently in theaters:
The writer-director Li Yang's stunningly realistic drama, a furious denunciation of injustices in contemporary China, is designed to elicit from viewers a primal cry of anger. Bai (Huang Lu), a young woman who has recently graduated from a big-city university, is hired as a saleswoman of herbal medicines and accompanies her boss and a colleague on a business trip to an isolated, mountainous rural village. There, they drug her, steal her I.D., and vanish, having sold her to a local peasant to be his wife. Confined, beaten, chained, and raped, she is still unwilling to submit to her fate, but her every effort to escape is thwarted by a society of permanent surveillance. Li reveals corruption at every level of Chinese society, including the urban nouveaux riches who sold Bai; the police, who demand payment for an investigation; and an E.R. doctor who won't perform lifesaving first aid without cash in hand. As if to prove who's to blame, the new outfit that Bai's captors bring her is bright red, just like the armbands of Party officials and the flags that greet them. As Bai peers out from her domestic prison at the majestic mountain vistas, they look like a wasteland of barbaric ignorance and official oppression. In Mandarin.
See it. Then think about the massacre in Tibet on Saturday. The Dalai Lama calls it "cultural genocide." Should the civilized world attend the China Olympics? Boycott? Or should it go just to protest? We'd like your opinion.
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