It is a source of frustration to some Chinese filmmakers that foreign audiences are easily duped. The most internationally successful films about China -- Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor -- wallow in marketable clichés. The China presented by these films exists almost solely in the simplified past tense, a mélange of incense, bound feet, and silk brocade designed to appeal to foreign notions of the country as unfathomably brutal and beautiful with an interminably long history.
Up until the late 1990s, much of the blame for this belonged to the government, which allowed the export of only those movies unlikely to provoke criticism of the present state of things, regardless of what they said about the past. Recently, however, films that deal with modern China, complex and often comic stories about everything from politics to relationships to harebrained attempts at money-making, have found their way to foreign viewers.
Beijing sits at the center of the Chinese film world and serves as the setting for most of the best films now being produced in China. Many of these cannot be seen even in Beijing itself except at small screenings unlikely to attract the attention of state censors. But those with access to a decent video rental shop will find a few.
Even Blockbuster carries copies of Shower (Xizao, 1999), Zhang Yang's at times sappy but ultimately enjoyable story of a Beijing bathhouse owner and his two sons (one of them retarded) struggling to maintain a sense of family despite pressures of modernization. The film's depiction of a doomed hutong neighborhood and the comic old characters who inhabit it won smatterings of praise in limited U.S. release and criticism from the Chinese authorities, who claimed it was anti-progress. Director Feng Xiaogang tried and failed to make it big in the U.S. with Big Shot's Funeral (Da Wan, 2001) featuring a (figuratively and literally) catatonic Donald Sutherland. But in a previous film set in and around Beijing, Sorry Baby (Mei Wan Mei Liao, 1999), Feng displays a defter touch in a romantic comedy featuring bald-headed comic Ge You at his brilliant best.
Among the earlier generation of films, two that deal specifically with Beijing were big hits at Cannes, and you should have no trouble finding them. Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji, 1993), directed by Chen Kaige and starring the talented Gong Li, is a long bit of lushness about a pair of Beijing opera stars more dramatic in their alleged rivalry over a woman than they are on stage. Zhang Yimou's unrelenting primer on modern Chinese history, To Live (Huozhe, 1994), also with Gong Li, traces the unbelievable tragedies of a single Beijing family as it bumbles through the upheavals of 20th-century China, from the civil war through the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao reform period. More difficult to find (particularly with English subtitles), but very much worth the effort, are 1980s productions of Lao She's darkly satirical works, The Teahouse (Cha Guan, 1982) and Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi, 1982).
Only specialty shops will carry In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang Canlan de Rizi, 1995), a smart and deceptively nostalgic coming-of-age film about a pack of mischievous boys left to their own devices in Cultural Revolution-era Beijing. Penned with help from celebrity rebel writer Wang Shuo, it was one of the first pictures to break free of the ponderous melodrama that dominated Chinese cinema through most of the 1990s. Life for migrant workers on the margins of Beijing is captured in the bleak but dryly witty The World (Shijie, 2004), set in The World Park in the southwestern suburbs of Beijing. At times it borders on melodrama, and much of the subtlety is lost in translation, but Jia Zhangke's film craft delivers a satisfying reverie on alienation, fantasy, and trust. If the film inspires you to "see the world without leaving Beijing," take bus 744 from opposite Beijing Railway Station to the terminus.
The documentary Gate of Heavenly Peace (1996) is obligatory viewing for anyone hoping to understand what transpired in 1989. If all you recall is a statue of liberty and talk of democracy, you're in for a shock.
