BIKE ENVY

by Geremie R. Barmé

This essay was originally broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National program Perspectives on February 22, 2002.

For many years now I have asked myself: What is it about "unofficial cinema" from China that makes international film reviewers and festival critics all too often gush with such enthusiasm? Do the forbidden delights of eye candy from the land of dim sum, like the taste of some forbidden fruit, really corrupt the taste buds and give otherwise sensible critics and writers a dizzying MSG hangover? It's got me beat, but after twenty-five years of watching Chinese cinema and over a decade of watching and studying nonofficial movies from the Mainland, I've got to say that I still don't get it.

Sure, I like the occasional film by worthy Fifth Wave directors like Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, or Tian Zhuangzhuang as much as the next comrade in the street, but ever since filmmakers set their gimlet eye on the international festival circuit and the hosannas of praise-giving critics, my ardor has waned. And when, in the early 1990s, a group of younger directorsmostly men and women in Beijing and Shanghai who are now in their mid- to late thirtiesbegan producing films for export, my palate became jaded and my senses dulled.

The latest example of boosterism gone mad is a film presently showing in cities around our barbwire-girthed island nation. It's called Beijing Bicycle, and it's the third cinematic attempt by a veteran of the underground film world of Beijing itself, Wang Xiaoshuai. The story of the film? Simple: naive country lad in Beijing gets a job with a new express-delivery company that sends its couriers off through the traffic-snarled streets and highways of the Chinese capital on mountain bikes to deliver important documents and suchlike. The country bumpkin antihero of the film has his bike stolen; a city-slicker high-school boywith good looks, a girl, and enough attitude to burnappears with the aforementioned bike, impresses his mates, and sends the girl into a swoon. The peasant boy, though deprived of dialogue and any sense of self-defense, steals the bike back, and thereafter a Manichean struggle between city and country in the form of the two male protagonists ensues.

Eventually an uneasy compromise is achieved with the boys deciding to ride the bike on alternate days. But that uneasy peace is broken by jealousies involving another boy with a bigger bike, and a hectic chase around the old alleyways of Houhai in central Beijing ensues. It all ends in a violent confrontation; the city slicker is wasted, and the peasant lad gets his bike back, but in gnarled pieces. End of story.

Why couldn't I enjoy this film? And why, oh why, can't I marvel at the prodigious effort that the edgy director Wang Xiaoshuai put into creating a film that has enjoyed rave reviews both before and since being awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival last year?

Well, for a start, although critics laud the film's realistic portrayal of Beijing society and life, I actually found the film to be as crude a caricature of urban China as anything that the Communist Party's cultural apparatus foists on its local audience. It portrays the young men and women from the country struggling to survive in the harsh environment of the city as quiescent and dumb. Anyone familiar with China will know that it is a nation of argumentation, extraordinary self-expression, opinions freely given, debates readily entered into, and red herrings happily slung into every verbal exchange. For the young rural men who have traveled to major cities like Beijing or Shanghai, meek silence is simply not an option; the old literary representation of country people or the Chinese generally as passive, silent, and hard-done-by is a myth continually negated by reality. And while the critics lap up the sights and sounds of Beijing as portrayed in Wang Xiaoshuai's seemingly realistic movie, people more familiar with that city (and that includes the locals) find that the clichés come flying as thick and fast as the brickbats in the last fight scene.

It's okay if you like some travelogue cuteness with your faux-Chinese grit, but if you want to see a good movie, the clapped-out clichés are just a bore. Wang dishes up all the usual stuff: the nasal threnody of Beijing opera wafting through the streets, hawkers selling their wares in old winding alleyways (few of which still exist in the urban sprawl of the post-socialist city), the faint sound of pigeons with whistles attached to their tails, a bit of this and a bit of that, elements of an Old Beijing that's all but disappeared. It makes for good fantasy, but to be dolled up as part of the cutting-edge reality of China today is something that can only satisfy well-meaning foreign audiences.

Maybe Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is right. Her remarks about the issue of cloning could be applied to this movie: "We have become so saturated with remakes, replications, homages and franchises," she writes, "that cloning no longer unnerves us." And she asks a question that worries this weary filmgoer: "What if originality happened and we missed it?"