Reviews

Schlondorff has no strong sense of what to make of his terrorist characters. Rita is idealistic but her personal life is pulled in rather conventional bourgeois directions. The film points to the paradox of idealistic murder and suggests that society has no ability to appreciate the complexity of such a character, but why should it when even a work of art like this film is unable to explore what's inside its title character. A muddled film about a muddled time.

The music in the version I saw was restrained and appropriate. Beware! You may not want to read further if you haven't seen the movie. A stunning movie. Lao Jin is steady, wise, experienced, not someone you would expect would join 15/16-year old Xiu Xiu (pronounced "Show Show") in a romantic murder-suicide, so it's all the more powerful and moving when he does. The shots of the serpentine river at dusk, the wide open spaces and Lao Jin on horseback racing along a ridge silhouetted against the ominous evening sky are fabulous. The male exploitation of Xiu Xiu is heart wrenching. The actress Lu Lu as Xiu Xiu is beautiful enough to suspend you in awe all by herself. It's reduced me to clichés I usually avoid. I had some difficulty with making Lao Jin emasculated from a war wound, as if that's the only way we would believe a herdsman would play father figure rather than seducer. It could have been entitled "Under the Sun." The cultural revolution has great aims to change social relationships, but the reality is there's nothing new under the sun. When Xiu Xiu belittles Lao Jin for being someone who only raises horses, he simply responds, "They raise me too." She can't understand how he's willing to spend his whole life in the country. He responds, "Every place is the same." The narration by Xiu Xiu's young male friend from Chengdu seems somewhat strained and unrealistic, since he could only have heard rumors about her fate, and it's a device with little practical effect on the story anyway, added, I suspect, only to try to add resonance. Before she knows it's a bath tub that Lao Jin is constructing, a curious, puzzled Xiu Xiu comments, "It's almost long enough for a coffin." Which is what it becomes, all the more appropriate because of her, and now his, symbolic effort to cleanse her body and purify her soul of the corruption which has invaded it. Lao Jin was slow to understand the cleansing power of water for Xiu Xiu. After the second man to come to the tent has his way with her, she asks Lao Jin if there's any water. He gives her tea or wild onion drink and she says no, she wants water, so he rides off to the river and returns with water, only to be surprised when, instead of drinking it, she uses it to wash herself. Bathing is for her a way of trying to restore some of her purity. He's a rustic and cleanliness has never been important to him. It's one of the things that separate them, an urban girl literally a class above the country laborer. Yet he's not nearly as slow to understand and feel the degradation the men bring her. Perhaps the bathing motif is part of the process by which he falls in love with her, simultaneously making her different and mysterious and allowing him to develop empathy. As he gradually sees and feels how she suffers and tries to cleanse herself, his heart is moved ever more deeply. In her childishness and homesickness Xiu Xiu mocks Lao Jin for his way of life in this vast landscape. "You don't have anything," she tries to taunt him. Not even a radio or a watch she says. He shows her his radio but he's not very interested in it. She talks about being able to get food in Chengdu made with so "many ingredients" that people wait in line for it. Waiting in line, ironically, is the predicament of "Educated Youth" like herself who need permits to return there, and the food prepared by Lao Jin she actually seems to like quite well. The other example of the superiority of cosmopolitan life she mentions is the Chengdu chrysanthemum show. This too is ironic, for surely, no flower show in the city could possibly compare to the beautiful wild flowers surrounding her in the country. As a, now, 16-year old girl, she's perhaps still too young to see the beauty of nature, but the landscape may be becoming less bleak to her. When storm clouds in the distance create a glorious rainbow, she says it's "as beautiful as the People's Boulevard in Chengdu." The possibility that in time she might have come to love these vast open spaces, like the possibility that she might have used her spirit and her wits to find a way to get back home, is just that, a possibility only, something that adds to our frustration and longing for her, our hope that she'll resist the men who would steal her innocence and her very life, and adds to our anguish that her life is so tragic. This film is a tremendously powerful feminist statement because of the way that what she sees as her only hope of escape is what seals her fate. Once she yields to the men, her reputation is destroyed and she can never go back. Chen juxtaposes a sequence of Lao Jin collecting eggs with the second visitor to the tent brutishly having sex with Xiu Xiu, cutting back and forth. Both sequences involve a plundering, but they're opposite in tone and feeling. He's planning to bring back the eggs for her, while she is in the process of giving up her innocence and dignity. I think Chen wants this context. She wants us to be thinking of the two acts together, for their differences, that Xiu Xiu doesn't really have to be giving in this way to another's corrupt lust, that with the pure love of Lao Jin something better could have been worked out. The juxtaposition just makes our anguish all the more heart-wrenching. In the post-film discussion Debbie Gaudet asked why Lao Jin doesn't try to stop the men from taking advantage of Xiu Xiu. A man said Lao Jin understood that his power was limited. A woman disagreed, asserting that he could have driven them off with his moral force. No doubt with his gun as well, but Lao Jin is a philosophical man. He takes a long view of things, and he could well have felt there would be eventual retribution. Shooting through the cap of one herdsman was about as far as he was prepared to go, at that point. But as he falls more deeply in love with Xiu Xiu and is more outraged with the way she's treated, he takes increasingly stronger action. When he shoots her, he takes his own life not only as a Byronesque, romantic act but because he knows he would be held responsible for killing her. Another woman said Lao Jin didn't try to stop the men who came to the tent because he respected her right to make her own decisions. Not exactly. I don't think he regarded her at age 15 or 16 to be quite an adult yet. The first two men, of course, came while he wasn't there. And Lao Jin had been around. He comes from a rough world. He knows what men are like. He understands nature, and while he's a good man, his morality is not exactly of the drawing-room variety. Virginity and purity probably mean less to him than to most. The torture Lao Jin once endured during the struggle in Tibet cost him his "manhood." But was he castrated or was his penis cut off? Other herdsmen making fun of him say they've heard he squats like a woman when he pees. Others describe him as a tea pot without a spout. And he dares the herdsmen to take him on and try to "bite off my balls," so he apparently still has that part of his anatomy. This could make a difference to how he sees Xiu Xiu and how he feels about her. If he'd lost his testicles, I imagine he'd suffer a hormonal change and wouldn't feel ordinary sexual desire. But if he lost his penis, he'd still have the desire without the ability to fulfill it. In a post-discussion discussion a woman who was a sent-down girl in China and survived the experience was asked by Debbie whether most people in China were against the program of sending the educated urban youth into the country. Her fascinating response was, "You have no way to be against." The question was an American, Western, liberal democratic question. The Chinese, then if not still, could not even think in terms of such a question. There were no elections, no public opinion polls, no letters to the editor, no way to register dissent of any kind. That was the policy. There was no choice. China's ban on Xiu Xiu is a good example not only of the narrowness of politicians but of their cowardice and short-sightedness. This is a movie about universal evil and corruption. It doesn't come down on the cultural revolution or Communism in particular, and is actually rather gentle in that regard, even understanding and compassionate toward the ideals of the program. And it certainly leaves a Western audience with more, not less, respect and admiration for China, that it can have produced so fine a work of art.