Beijing Bicycle (2002)

Harvey S. Karten

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We Americans used to scoff at the designation that theCommunist government on the Chinese mainland gave to theircountry. "The People's Republic of China." Ha! They probably treat their citizens like cattle, work them to death for just enoughpay to get by, send them to fight in places like Korea (where, we used to think, they were drugged by their honchos in what was then called Peking) and sent in hordes to do battle against the Americans and South Koreans. What's the story now? A funny thing happened on the way modern times. Look at the Chinese capital, Beijing, as filmed by Liu Jie under the able direction of Beijing Film School graduate Wang Xiaoshaui, and you'd think you were in Hong Kong. In a stretch you can make that New York. It's STILL not the People's Republic because ironically, the people seem to be swiftly losing what made them a community. Wang's movie makes the residents, as symbolized by two teen-agers, a dog-eat-dog world, hungry for status and riches, eager to acquire cars, maids, and (as we see in the final sequence) SUV's. The West won the Cold War, all right, not by seizing territory in China or even by establishing Coca-Cola plants in Shanghai and buying umbrellas from them, but by culturally winning over the hearts and minds of both the sometimes hotheaded aging government and the really cool young people who look like students at Eton and Harrow in their dark suits, white shirts and ties.

In this story, conducted at the leisurely pace that two hours' running time gives writer-producer Peggy Chiao, two young men are pitted against each other, their backgrounds serving as metaphor for the country itself. As Guei, Cui Lin performs in the role of a country boy who moves to the big, capital city in search of work and finds it as a courier with a private delivery company. (The training lecture that the boss of the capitalistic firm gives to the young men about to peel out to make their consignments
resembles that afforded to the Fed-Ex workers in Moscow by Tom Hanks in "Cast Away".) Guei is eager to buy the bike given him and is told he can do so after putting in just one month's work--after which he will split the money he earns for the firm 50-50 with the boss. How's that for capitalism? Unfortunately his bike is stolen and unwittingly purchased by city-boy Jian (Li Bin), resulting in Guei's being dismissed from the firm and his neighborhood-wide search for the missing bike. When he finds it, he discovers that wrestling it away from its new owner is no easy task. The bulk of the film embraces the conflict between the two teens for ownership of the wheels, a conflict which exposes for us in the audience the foundations of the new class struggle in the world's most populous nation--rural vs. urban, the older traditional ways vs. the fast-paced new, middle-class vs. workers, students vs. blue-collar. 

If the film is overlong, with director Wang Xiaoshuai's spending too much time repeating battle scenes between the two lads, and if Mr. Wang is not quite Ridley Scott in filming his fight scenes (which look more like combat waged on an off-off Broadway stage), "Beijing Bicycle" stands tall among releases contrasting tradition with modernity. Though the burglary of a bicycle is the motivating event, this picture has little in common with Vittorio De Sica's 1947 classic "The Bicycle Thief" but shares its theme with that of Zhang Yang's more diversified and compelling 1999 movie "Shower." Mr. Zhang's story does a better job sticking to its through-line--a stark comparison between the life of an old man tending a traditional public bathhouse about to be torn down and replaced by a skyscraper, and his thoroughly modern son whose idea of a cleanup involves a quick dip under an impersonal shower as though he were an auto being spiffed up for a ride about town. But "Beijing Bicycle" is the inevitable product coming from a country in transition, one that jolts people into thinking of the leisurely, communal way of life being shunted aside for the alleged glories of the current, the cool, the capitalistic.

From Rotten Tomatoes

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