Otherwise Maladroit

30 August 2001 Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl

30 August 2001

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl's plot is so simple I could tell it to you now in a few lines. There's a little bit of help if you know something about the Communist revolution in China and Mao's Great Leap Forward, but that's provided in a clearly printed summary at the beginning of the film. However, what you won't get from not watching the movie is the hopelessness and heartbreak that can only be communicated through human expression, and which the unending grasslands of China beautifully frame.

How a movie makes me feel, either to be sympathetic or to be repulsed, is what, for me, separates great movies from ordinary movies. This one definitely made me feel - it set my teeth to grinding, in fact. I have no idea if Lopsang does look like a sun-kissed Tibetan wilderness man, but I wanted to wring his neck and compel him to do something spectacularly heroic along the lines of Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China series. Alas, it wouldn't be realistic.

You and I know that reality is frustrating, and that facts are never black or white but a mundane shade of gray. Admittedly, I often fashion romantic interpretations to grand ideas and to prominent figureheads. Although my lily-livered alter ego has prevented me from being an activist, it hasn't stopped me from flirting with Communism. Maybe it is for want of the discipline or control that is sadly absent in my life that makes living in a regimented commune inviting. It could also be that my dissatisfaction over my lack of status and power in society has introduced me to radicalism. All I know is that the Catholic teaching that I used to eat and spout is now not enough to medicate me through life. It's like finding immunity to Prozac.

However, it is films like this that, ironically, rips off my rose-tinted glasses and forces me to understand that as much as I'd want to idealize, reality is never perfect. Pundits and philosophers may debate about what went wrong in the Chinese experience no matter how good (at least in paper) the intentions and ideas were of their leaders, but it somehow never brings justice to the effect on millions under this social experiment.

Just as the innocent were lost in the Crusades, the blindly faithful gave their lives to the Fuehrer, and the nationalistic were shipped to Vietnam, those urban Chinese youth sent to the provinces to learn among simple folk were deployed to battle for a pointless intellectual idea that had little to do with them, but meant a lot for the image of the political elite. Be very leery of those in government who only tell you positive things, because ten-to-one they're sweeping the dirt under the carpet. Worse, they're doing it to dumb you down.

posted by Otherwise Maladroit @ 5:24 PM