Seen from the perspective of a window washer who is one of the main characters in Lost in Beijing (蘋果), the Chinese capital is an endless vista of glassy high-rises. Closer to the ground, in the lyrical documentary montages that frame Li Yu’s (李玉) modern urban melodrama, the city is a hive of human work and pleasure seeking. There are tango clubs and dive bars, car dealerships and open-air markets, nouveau riches in their Mercedes-Benzes and homeless people stretched out on benches.
There are, at last count, something like 17 million stories in this naked city, and Li, who wrote the screenplay for Lost in Beijing with Fang Li (方勵), relates a tale that is at once representative of the social and economic tensions afflicting 21st-century China and ripely, improbably melodramatic. The director and her cast work in a rough, naturalistic style, but the narrative offers both the pleasures and the limitations of old-fashioned class-conscious pulp. In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.
An-kun (played by Tong Da Wei, 佟大為), the window washer, is married to Ping-guo (Fan Bingbing, 范冰冰), who works at the Gold Basin Massage Palace rubbing the feet of tired businessmen and deflecting their roving hands. Her boss, Mr Lin (Tony Leung Ka Fai, 梁家輝), is a rough character as yet unpolished by money, an unapologetic gambler and womanizer. One afternoon he finds Ping-guo passed out in his office, and his attempt to take advantage of her turns from a clumsy pass into a rape. An-kun, who happens to be washing the window of Mr Lin’s office and witnesses the assault — this is what I mean by improbable — tries first to attack the older, more powerful man and then to blackmail him.
When Ping-guo discovers she’s pregnant, Lost in Beijing begins a curious, not entirely successful transition from melodrama to domestic comedy. Mrs Lin (Elaine Jin, 金燕玲), who is infertile, takes her revenge on her husband by sleeping with An-kun, even as Mr Lin starts to see his own possible paternity as a neat solution for everyone. The baby, he reasons, will save his marriage, and the more than 100,000 yuan he will pay Ping-guo and An-kun for their trouble will assuage his guilt and help the young couple toward a better and more prosperous life.
Though the film’s emotional tone is blurry — toward the end it swerves away from farce and back toward anguish — its social criticism could hardly be more clear. The metropolis it depicts is one in which money is the measure of all value, and in which every human relationship can be reduced to a transaction, a deal. Ping-guo and An-kun, industrious young people from a Northeastern province, are unsurprisingly overwhelmed by this way of life, but so, in their own way, are Mr and Mrs Lin. Jin, one of Taiwan’s finest actresses, and Leung, a durable star of the Hong Kong cinema, rescue their characters from easy caricature.
The other actors are also very good — Fan’s blend of toughness and delicacy places her in a rich tradition of Chinese screen heroines — and, along with the city itself, they help give Lost in Beijing a human complexity that cuts against the schematic artifice of its story.
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child? Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad. Reif wept. She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as
Charges have formally been brought in Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) bribery, corruption and embezzling of campaign funds cases. Ko was briefly released on bail by the Taipei District Court on Friday, but the High Court on Sunday reversed the decision. Then, the Taipei District Court on the same day granted him bail again. The ball is in dueling courts. While preparing for a “year ahead” column and reviewing a Formosa poll from last month, it’s clear that the TPP’s demographics are shifting, and there are some indications of where support for the party is heading. YOUNG, MALE
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