Word: leis
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...LEI, former managing editor, Shanghai Tatler Start out with a walk in the old neighborhoods near the Yuyuan Gardens. This is where Shanghai originated, and you can still get a sense of the ancient rhythms of daily life. Then, head to dinner at a tiny, authentic Shanghainese restaurant called Chun (Spring) on Jinxian Road in the historic [an error occurred while processing this directive] French Concession. Two ordering musts: the braised fatty pork and the glutinous rice balls in a sweet wine broth. To finish the evening, check out modern Shanghai at a hot new bar called Mimosa, located...
...either too conventional or too oblique to send audiences marching into the streets. Lou Ye's Summer Palace, the only Asian film in the competition, boldly depicted the Tiananmen Square revolt of 1989 but was more concerned with the sexual politics of its heroine (the sulkily charismatic Hao Lei). She and her sex scenes were hot stuff, but the movie's critical response was tepid. Three war movies also failed to astound: Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a predictable rendering of the 1920 Irish battle of Catholic peasants against the Black and Tans; Bruno Dumont...
...boldness is as least as much sexual as political. The lead character, Yu Hong, is a bundle of very Western-style neuroses, and a one-woman sexual liberation army. Her love scenes have a volcanic intensity not seen before in a Mainland Chinese film, and Hao Lei, the young actress who plays Yu Hong, has an urgent eroticism that mesmerizes the audience (or at least this member of it). She made me think both of the young Joan Chen, who was a teen idol before coming to the West in the early '80s, and of the divine, androgynous Leslie Cheung...
...Halfway through, when the story moves from Beijing to Berlin, the film careers off the tracks, and I wouldn't recommend it in toto. But I respect Lou Ye's audacity. And I'll be watching for Hao Lei, while hoping that other Chinese filmmakers, who routinely tilt against their government, can some day be as unfettered in their approach to affairs of the bedroom as to affairs of state...
...antelope from unscrupulous poachers. Ritai (played with furious gusto by Tibetan actor Duobuji) copes with the murder of one of his men in the only way he knows: he starts hunting the hunters. With the grace of a master filmmaker, Lu seamlessly folds the story of Ga Yu (Zhang Lei), a wet-behind-the-ears reporter for a Beijing newspaper, into Ritai’s crusade against the poachers, deftly obscuring frontier journalism with frontier revenge. The subtitles that accompany the Mandarin and Tibetan dialogue don’t hamper such dramatic complexity, primarily thanks to Lu?...