Word: xu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Exhaling smoke with a particular world-weariness only a beautiful woman can conjure, Xu Jinglei announces she's tired of Oriental mystique, all the brocade and bamboo and aerial kung-fu artistry. That's ironic, given that the movie director, 31, with her chopstick physique and brushstroke features, would fit quite nicely into an epic about a woman named, say, Plum Blossom...
...Xu, a film starlet who has matured into a multitalented cinematic force--she won the Best Director award at the San Sebastián Film Festival in Spain last year--has grander ambitions than playing to type. "I want to show people that Chinese are just like everyone else," she says. "There's a myth that Eastern people are conservative and mysterious, but we sing and dance and feel the same emotions as anyone else...
...Xu's outlook could be a mantra for today's postideological China. What is in some ways most striking about the country, as new middle-class consumers flock to shopping malls, is how normal it feels. Although billboards celebrating the glory of the Communist Party can still be found in Beijing, they tend to elicit derision instead of deference--and even Chairman Mao's visage has morphed into a Pop-art commodity in the capital's avant-garde galleries...
...current darling of a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, Xu may one day take on the mantle worn by venerable directors like Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern). Zhang helped introduce Chinese cinema to global audiences, first with finely rendered political allegories and then with more muscular martial-arts epics. On the other hand, Xu--a factory owner's daughter who grew up in go-go China--focuses on what she knows and feels. In her 2002 directorial debut, My Father and I, she explored the upended Confucian hierarchy of contemporary urban Chinese society. That effort...
...Staff writer Risheng Xu can be reached at xu4@fas.harvard.edu...