Summer Movies 4

Appropriate to the opening of the Olympic games in China, we have been treated to several summer art films on or about China and a couple of big American films to help us escape from all that.

• Up the Yangtze is a Canadian film directed by Yung Chang, is a documentary that lets us go along on a cruise ship trip up China’s ancient Yangtze River, which is being transformed by the world’s biggest dam project, the Three Gorges Dam. This is a fascinating film and well worth seeing.

When environmentalists carp about every sort of enterprise in the western world that may affect ecology, what can they say about China, which considers it more important to provide sufficient electric power for their growing middle class urban population than to worry about ecology. In China, political correctness is not an issue; the government has much bigger problems.

Without comment, we will meet the poorest of the poor, eking out a living as the dammed waters inundate their former land and village. City after city is being evacuated as the waters rise and new towns are being built overnight for the evacuees. Yes, the squalor is gone, but so is community. However, we also meet Chinese who are enormously impressed with a government capable of turning a fabled river into a lake rising behind the dam.

This is what we should all know about China. This country has raised more people out of poverty more quickly than any society in history—yet there are still so many others living in ancient squalor—not surprising with a population of more than 1 billion people. The transformation of China since it rejoined the world in the 1970s is breathtaking.

• Tuya’s Marriage is a Chinese movie that is filmed in Inner Mongolia, part of China. This is an interesting film to see after seeing Mongol (my last review), the story of the childhood and youth of Genghis Khan. The Mongols created one of the world’s largest empires in the 13th century—a rather remarkable feat considering that they were horsemen with nothing resembling a civilization. Quick learners after they conquered Persia and China, they adopted civilization and ran an amazingly efficient, but brief empire. Now five centuries later, we see some of them back to square one, living a grim, difficult herding life in one of the bleakest, most inhospitable region of central Asia.

The story is about a young woman herder whose husband has become disabled while trying to dig a water well for them. She, her young son, and her husband are having a very hard time surviving, despite her efforts. We see what passes for food in that culture and the prodigious quantities of alcohol consumed to blunt the pain of work and climate. A friend advises her to divorce her husband and marry again, which she finally agrees to do provided that her next husband will accept supporting her handicapped husband too.

Word gets out that she is available for marriage and the suitors come from all over, but none of them are willing to accept her conditions. Finally, two suitors do—one of them a wealthy former schoolmate and the other a neighbor who has always loved her. Her dilemma is which to choose.

What is fascinating is the persistence of indigenous people living very difficult lives (be it Mongolia, the Himalayas, or Alaska) to stay rather than move to much more comfortable modern cities which are available to them. I find it hard to understand but respect it anyway.

• Mama Mia! If you love funky Greek Islands and enjoy seeing Meryl Streep, perhaps the best actress of her generation, singing and dancing in a very goofy movie, you will like this one. I sat through it and wondered how much better this film would have been if it were a comedy of manners rather than a silly musical.

It is fun to consider a young woman getting married who, after reading her mother’s diaries, invites three possible candidates for being her father to the wedding. That would have been enough for me. “Dancing Queen” with the most silly choreography just did not make it better.

• Batman: The Dark Knight. This summer blockbuster can be viewed several ways: as one more comic book hero to amuse the primarily youth audience; as an important film for Hollywood regulars with interest in Academy Award nominations (posthumously for Heath Ledger as The Joker); or—as it was for me—an exploration of anarchy and anarchic evil.

For those who will see this film beyond its comic book appeal, this is a fascinating film about anarchy, democracy, and hero-worship—all issues that face us around the world today. If the writers didn’t intend this, they certainly fooled me.

Heath Ledger, a wonderful Australian actor who first appeared as a 20 year old in a film in 1999 and died of prescription drug overdose this year, played the Joker, a monster modeled after Sid Vicious, a British punk rocker with an ugly history. Ledger’s Joker was very scary indeed—a passionate believer in anarchy who not only created anarchy himself, but wanted to validate his belief by proving that anarchy, not order, was one inch under the skins of the civilized.

He managed to play this horrible creature in such a way that one could see the damaged child under his monstrousness. Like all monsters in the world, he was able to fabricate a rationale that justified his actions. He was not crazy; he was evil.

The other element of this movie that made me uncomfortable was the notion that the people need a hero. Batman, of course, was that hero, fighting crime and disorder because the police were inadequate to the task. This is, of course, a very dangerous role because the line between hero and monster is thin. Another character with this dilemma was a Golden Boy district attorney, newly promoted from Internal Affairs (much hated by most police). Here is a hero who, like Batman, is challenged by that line between virtue and vice.

It is a question that always turns up in a fight against very bad forces: in fighting them, does one become them? America ran into that problem during World War II in fighting the Nazis and Japanese. We did, in the end, become almost as violent as our enemies—but as soon as the war ended, our normal decency returned. Had our enemies won, there would have been no decency. So I think the Joker was mistaken. We are not all like him. 1,100 words

Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.