Up The Yangtze (3 1/2 stars)
Written and directed by Yung Chang. With Cindy Shui Yu, Campbell Ping He, and Jerry Bo Yu Chen. (NR)
At the start of Up The Yangtze, a quote attributed to Confucius details the three ways of learning wisdom: by reflection (the noblest), by imitation (the easiest), or by experience (the bitterest). Though we hope the wisdom gained by those in the film won't be by the third method, we suspect otherwise.
The Yangtze is China's most majestic river, and it is on the verge of being choked off. When completed and fully operational, the Three Gorges dam across the Yangtze will be the world's largest hydroelectric project, able to power dozens of large cities with the energy produced by its generators. It also means a rise in the river level that's equivalent to turning the Grand Canyon into a lake, forcing the relocation of over two million people whose homes will be flooded by the rising waters.
Yet Up The Yangtze largely foregoes the bigger questions of morality and ecological concerns to focus on the Westernization of China and the schism between old and new. It's a strange focus, one that doesn't ask many questions about what is admittedly a fait accompli, but one leaves the theater feeling that the whole story is still untold.
Instead, the film focuses on two Chinese youths who take work with the cruise boats that ferry Western passengers along the river for a look at a disappearing China. On these "Farewell Cruises" a band plays "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and cruise workers, given American names as part of their jobs, play to stereotypes; He Ping, given the name Campbell, suggests he'll answer to Campbell's Soup. An onboard pianist gives basic lessons in the language by singing a song that begins, "it's so easy/ to learn Chinese-ee."
Yu Shui ("Cindy") goes to work to help her family, though she dreams of schooling beyond her middle school. Her mother and father are illiterate, and can't afford the cost of higher education. When she leaves to join the ship, her mother stays behind, explaining, "I can't read—I might send you to the wrong boat." Yet she also tells her daughter not to worry about spending too much on food. "Don't think of us then," she says, though they will depend on the money the teenager is able to send home. Onboard, she labors in the kitchen, crying into the sink.
Chen Bo Yu ("Jerry"), on the other hand, is a few years older, speaks better English, and is much more ambitious. He's also a bit of a lout and quickly realizes the best way to make money is to ignore the elderly and the young to concentrate on the middle-aged women who tip the best. Perhaps tellingly, he switches to English as he boasts about how his income has surpassed that of his parents. Despite his braggadocio, it still feels like a blow when his fortunes change late in the film.
Interspersed among the cruise footage are other segments, including a particularly effective one of a Potemkin village of relocated people, set up for visiting cruise passengers. Look, their guide says—a refrigerator, color TV, air-conditioning! Seeing is believing! The truth, of course, is not so simple, as evidenced by another segment featuring the film's rawest emotional moment, in which a shopkeeper sitting in front of an impassive bust of Mao breaks down in angry, frustrated tears. The resettlement has meant beatings, the loss of a way of life, and more. "It's hard being a human, but being a common person in China is more difficult," he says.
All in all, it's a damning document, one that need do little but present the facts—voiceovers are scarce, as are direct interviews; the images speak their own story. And those images, from tourists donning traditional Chinese garments for vacation photos to the time-lapse dissolves of a rising river swallowing whole ways of life, say more than we wish were possible.
Sex And The City (2 1/2 stars)
Directed by Michael Patrick King. Written by Michael Patrick King based on the work of Candace Bushnell. With Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Christopher Noth, Jennifer Hudson, and David Eigenberg. (R)
Sex And The City, the big-screen wrap-up to the loose threads of the erstwhile television series, is a mixed affair. When it concentrates on the business of living the high life in New York—dinner and drinks, penthouse apartments, the latest must-have bag from Louis Vuitton—it floats along like a fizzy champagne cocktail. When it strives for greater depth in its dissection of the state of modern love, it goes flat.
Picking up some years after the end of the series, the film kicks off with a quick recap that gives newcomers the broad strokes. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is a distant wife, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is a nervous mom, and hypersexual Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is living on the West Coast with her young boyfriend, but spends most of her time ogling her neighbor and his rotating cast of sexual partners.
Carrie Bradshaw, the "ultimate single girl" played by Sarah Jessica Parker, has settled into a relationship with Mr. Big (Chris Noth), the on-again, off-again romantic interest with whom she reunited in the series' final episode. They're about to move into a breathtaking penthouse apartment when the subject of marriage comes up—Big, twice burned, is in no hurry, but goes along with it, even if he's not thrilled with the Page Six announcement or Carrie's bridal spread in Vogue. In the meantime, Miranda's marriage is dissolving under the weight of her husband's infidelity, and when Carrie's plans go spectacularly south, the female foursome head for Mexico to lick their wounds.
Not much happens after those early upsets—until the inevitable resolution, the rest of the film is essentially a long period of wallowing, punctuated by some cheap jokes. A diamond ring is delivered disguised as an erection; Samantha buys a dog that compulsively humps pillows; someone craps their pants (really). Wedged into this is a fun, if obvious, subplot involving Carrie's assistant Louise (Jennifer Hudson), whose role is a painfully manufactured way to teach Carrie about love.
But if not much happens, the resolution is a long time coming—at almost two and a half hours, the film is too long by at least 30 minutes—and the plot is padded with no fewer than three music-and-fashion passages where we watch Carrie parade around in couture; the designer name product placement is at once fitting and wildly overdone here. Perhaps to make up for the gross commercialism of the shilling, the writers try to add meaning with voiceovers meant to sound deep: "…and as the last of the autumn leaves fell away, so did Charlotte's fears." The effect is like trying to pack a library into Carrie's shoe closet: it doesn't fit, and it doesn't belong there anyway.
For fans of the show, little of this will matter. And there are moments, especially in the estrangement of Miranda and Steve, where the film actually approaches something meaningful, only to back away in favor of the easy glitz of Carrie's life. That life, anchored by money, glamour and image, doesn't seem half as rich.
My Blueberry Nights (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Wong Kar Wai. Written by Lawrence Block and Wong Kar Wai. With Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, and Chan Marshall. (PG-13)
My Blueberry Nights, the new film from the wildly talented Wong Kar Wai (In The Mood For Love), is a different kind of work. Best known for his hothouse studies set in Hong Kong, he delivers his first English language film, co-written by longtime crime novelist Lawrence Block. It's not as unnatural a pairing as it might seem; Wong's films are often pregnant with suspense, conscious of their own artifice, and lit with the shadows and neon of noir.
Here, the pair have crafted a road picture romance in three acts, demarcated by region (New York City, Memphis and Nevada) and the shifting name of its main character (Elizabeth, Lizzie, Betty, Beth). Played by singer Norah Jones—more on that later—Elizabeth is both on the run from a failed romance and on the road home to a possible new relationship with expat diner owner Jeremy, played with a breezy charm by Jude Law.
When the film opens, Elizabeth has just learned that her boyfriend is cheating on her—at least, that's the implication; all we really know is that he's been eating pork chops with someone else at the diner. A week later, she's still hanging around the front door, waiting to see if he'll come pick up the keys she's added to the collection Jeremy keeps behind the counter. All the keys have stories attached to them, mostly having to do with love lost, and Jeremy keeps hoping that at least some of the stories will have a happy ending.
His budding feelings for Elizabeth are frustrated when she suddenly moves to Memphis to sort out her life, and kept alive by the stream of postcards she sends back to the diner. Read by Jones in voiceover, they chart not only her life but the lives of those around her: alcoholic cop Arnie (David Strathairn, heartbreaking and nuanced) and his estranged wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz), whose volatile relationship, the stuff of an easy Southern drama, is instead made sad and real by the strong performances of its actors.
The same can be said, though to a lesser extent, about Natalie Portman's role as a card shark in the film's Nevada piece. Her bottle-blond Leslie is a lost soul who hides behind a big mouth and outsized personality, and she quickly convinces Elizabeth to use her savings to stake her in a backroom poker game. The results of that game put the pair on the road yet again, and mark the beginning of Elizabeth's return east. "I've been learning how to not trust people, and I'm glad I failed," she says.
This isn't Wong's top-tier work. Part of the problem lies in the casting of Jones in the main role; her languid style translates here as lazy, and she often seems unsure of exactly what to do in front of the camera. Surrounding her with such obviously better actors strengthens the picture, but makes her own shortcomings stand out in even sharper relief. She does a bit better on the soundtrack, alongside Cassandra Wilson, Ry Cooder, Otis Redding and Cat Power (who also has a tiny role as Law's old flame).
But for fan's of Wong's earlier work, the American setting itself presents a larger problem. At his best working with intimate, sometimes almost claustrophobic interiors, he's faced here with the blinding expanse of the American West, and it overpowers his natural strengths (to be fair, this film is his first without longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle). While he still makes wonderful use of color—notably during the diner sequences, and in a recurring time-lapse motif of ice cream melting into warm blueberry pie—there seems to be almost too much of it here, and it feels as if Wong struggles to rein in the prismatic explosion that makes our country its often gaudy self.
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