Bicycles
are as synonymous with Beijing as cabs are with Manhattan, and
when the hero of Wang Xiaoshuai's superb and harrowing
"Beijing Bicycle" joins the swarm of cyclists who crowd the
city's streets, he stands for countless young people who have
made the journey from the country to China's capital in search
of a better life.
Cui Lin's
shy yet stubborn Guei considers himself lucky. He has a place
to live!with a friend in an old compound with small quarters
for working people. Even better, he has landed a job as a
messenger that provides him with a uniform and an impressive
silver mountain bike that will become his once he has earned
700 yuan, which is about
$85.
A determined worker,
Guei will earn this sum in little over a month, yet by then he
will have discovered how mean-spirited city people can be. For
instance, he's summoned to the gym in a luxury hotel and is
forced to shower before he can enter, only to discover the
hotel expects him to pay for it. Then just before the bike is
to become his!after which he will split the delivery fees
instead of having to give 80% to his employer!it is stolen.
His boss will take him back if he finds the
bicycle.
"Beijing Bicycle's"
story now takes off in earnest. The bicycle has fallen into
the hands of a another young man, Jian (Li Bin), but it is not
immediately clear whether he bought or stole it. What is clear
is that he wanted it in the worst way, to impress his pals at
school and his new girlfriend Qin (Zhou Xun). His father has
been promising to get him a bike, but that money now must go
toward his younger half-sister's education. Had not chance and
poverty placed Guei and Jian in the same neighborhood, Guei
probably would never have seen his bicycle
again.
What emerges is a
portrait of modern urban life at its most brutal. Jian is in
such a state of rage toward his father and so eager to be a
member of a group more prosperous than his family that he is
blinded to the fact that Guei needs his bicycle to earn a
living!and that his pals, for all their prep school ties and
blazers, are virtually a gang, each one a violent, thuggish
brute.
Inevitably, "Beijing
Bicycle" brings to mind Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist
classic, "The Bicycle Thief," but it also recalls Akira
Kurosawa's early masterpiece, "Stray Dog," in which a young
police detective searches for his stolen gun throughout a
war-ravaged Tokyo, needing to find his weapon to regain his
sense of manhood as intensely as Jian needs the bike for
social acceptance. Wang, however, has a bleaker vision than De
Sica or Kurosawa, moving beyond the question of whether Jian
will ultimately see his so-called friends for what they really
are. For Xiaoshuai, modern urban life in China is destructive,
the notion of a Communist classless society a cruel joke in
which the struggle for survival is ruthless, even more so than
in the big cities of the Western
world.
From start to finish,
"Beijing Bicycle" moves adroitly with the emotional impact of
a steamroller. Xiaoshuai comes from the ranks of China's
underground cinema and has seen all of his work either heavily
censored or banned outright. With this masterful, flawless
film, he emerges in the front ranks of China's now numerous,
world-renowned filmmakers.
From Los Angeles
Times
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