The pilots in this so-called Chinese Top Gun are mostly top in the sense that they are in selfless support of China’s frontline troops thanks to the emerging technological superiority of the People’s Republic (which would have made for a less snappy title). Another in China’s seemingly never-ending line of propagandistic, government-backed action films, this is only distinguished in dunderheaded patriotism from its American 80s and 90s equivalents by its absence of any functioning sense of humour. It’s about the country’s next-generation fighter pilots, but the plot is last-generation: promising…
Tag: World cinema
Ximei review – Ai Weiwei produces inspiring portrait of Chinese Aids activist
Produced by Ai Weiwei, this is a rousing portrait of Liu Ximei, an astonishingly resilient Aids activist; it also sheds light on a controversial government campaign that accelerated the epidemic in 1990s China. During the first half of the decade, poor farmers were encouraged to donate their blood in exchange for money. Due to a lack of health and safety standards, a staggering number of donors as well as those who received transfusions contracted HIV. In Ximei’s province of Henan, more than 300,000 villagers live with the debilitating effects of…
One Second review – Zhang Yimou’s censored love letter to cinema reels you in
In 2019, this film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou was pulled from the Berlin film festival because of, ahem, technical problems. The real reason, widely speculated at the time, was likely to have been politically motivated: the Chinese Communist party’s displeasure with the film’s portrait of the Cultural Revolution. Now, re-edited and partially reshot, it’s finally getting a release. And with all the tinkering and tweaks, what censors haven’t been able to expunge is the torment and suffering on the face of Zhang Yi’s political prisoner; this is a deeply…
Ode to the Spring review – manipulative Chinese Covid-onset drama
This strident and heavy-handed Mandarin-language drama imagines a collage of stories unfolding in Wuhan as the first, terrible wave of the pandemic broke. A husband and wife, both medics, reunite in their car each night where they snatch a few hours of sleep between shifts; their daughter, alone with her piano in their apartment, bickers with the neighbours. A selfless building manager, responsible for distributing supplies to the quarantined residents, starts to cough. Even if it were less mawkish and manipulative in approach, it’s hard to imagine that many people…