Two
teen-age boys, one bike. Each sees wheels as a way to the good life.
Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle tells
their shared story as a study in contrast and commonality; as a timeless
tale of urgent, if flawed, youthful conviction; as a richly specific
portrait of a nation, a culture, a city in transition. This film puts
Wang at the forefront of China's Sixth Generation of film makers.
They are younger than internationally acclaimed
Fifth Generation masters Zhang Yimou (the subject of two irreverently
affectionate references in Wang's new film) and Chen Kaige. Despite
persistent censorship, this new generation boldly, brilliantly points
the way to a cinema that finds inspiration not in the past or in the
country but in the urban here and now. As just that kind of film,
Beijing Bicycle will come to be viewed as a seminal work.
It tells the story of a young man who has just
abandoned his village for life in the city. You see an explosively
vibrant Beijing through his eyes. It is a place where cars are crowding
out bicycles along the major arteries; where a new market economy has
created a class of monied businessmen and the posh spas, chic bars and
dressy women that suit their taste.
The lad from
the country finds the job of his dreams as a messenger for an express
delivery service. After working for pennies, he eventually earns the
rights to the bicycle he rides and so to a decent living. Then the bike
is stolen.
It winds up in a flea market where
another teen-age boy buys it. He's a city lad but one whose family
cannot afford to buy him the bike that will give him the social standing
of others at his school who come from wealthier families. With wheels of
his own, he gains acceptance; most particularly, from a pretty female
classmate.
The two boys come to blows over the
bike, work out a private arrangement that seems to suit them, then fall
prey to a gang of cigarette-smoking bullies with dyed hair, big
sunglasses, attitude to spare and a shocking lust for violence. The
film's final frame shows that justice, however battered, prevails, but
Beijing Bicycle is as much meditation as linear narrative.
There's not a hint of the schematic or a
suggestion of pomposity in Wang's approach. Yet it's clear that with
this story of two boys and a bike, he speaks urgently of the distinction
between need and desire and of the potentially ruinous consequences for
a society that fails to come to grips with that distinction.
The view is neither romantic nor polemical.
Beijing vistas themselves tell the story in hard, observable terms: the
fabled alleyways of the city, true neighborhoods for generations of
impoverished natives, yield to a skyline dominated by skyscrapers and
building cranes. The old appears hushed and shadowy while the new just
gleams in its pronouncement of progress, privilege, power.
Whose progress, whose privilege, whose power?
Perhaps, one day, and soon enough with the speed
of change in Beijing's urban and social landscape, the boy from the
village on a bike in the city will inherit his piece of China's suddenly
current dream. Perhaps not.
In provocative,
galvanizing, deeply human terms, Wang poses the question in Beijing
Bicycle and provides images that suggest the complexity as well as
the universal resonance of the full spectrum of answers. It's a landmark
film.
From Rotten
Tomatoes
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