Blind mountain

The cultural overlords of China do not want to be seen as mere propagandists protecting the Communist Party's image. They seem aware that some flowers, albeit never 10,000, should be allowed to blossom even if they do not emit healthy communist aromas. An occasional movie with gritty reality is very acceptable for showing at overseas film festivals, showing the make-believe world it can believe that China's artists operate free of censorship.

Movie-makers can portray something wrong in the Chinese garden if the wrong is caused by pre-Communist weeds such as feudal traditions and evil human exploitation. Blind Mountain (aka Road Home) is a depressingly bitter depiction of the widespread traffic in young women. They are kidnapped and sold to rural peasant families in need of hard-working, obedient and fertile bride-servants for their unmarried sons.

Babies and children have long been traded too by traffickers, and the implementation of the one-child policy in China created even more demand for an ancient practice. Writer-director Li Yang looks at the issue through the case of a naive young university graduate tricked into taking a work trip into a rural mountain boondocks in Shaanxi Province. Drugged and sold to a village farmer with a very lumpen prole of a son, the city girl tries resistance, flight and guiles to get out of her captivity. Her unsympathetic mother-in-law urges patient acceptance, and so do the village's other kidnapped brides.

The only educated man in the village, the schoolteacher, dare not help, nor can the isolated area's pair of impotent policemen. The girl is doomed to drudgery, rape, child-bearing and abuse. One of her pleas does get out of the village, and her father arrives from the city, but he too cannot beat the system. The old village ways seem amorally all-powerful until the girl accidentally takes the law into her own hands, in the only way the old world can understand. The movie depends on its only professional actor, Huang Lu, to make the girl's plight credible, and she does. The Taiwanese cinematographer, Jong Lin, endows her and the setting with a sad, harsh beauty.

I'm glad I saw the dvd made for the international market. Li made various closing scenes. It was depressing to find out the state-approved one, for the domestic market, gave the useless policemen an unreal success.

Li is creating a good track record for making documentary dramas, which he also produces and edits. In Blind Shaft, China's privately-owned coal mines are the setting for institutional and human horror shows, when a cheerfully gullible village boy is the next chosen victim for a pair of murderous blackmailers gaining compensation for miners killed in engineered pit accidents.

Gripping stories, good scripts and acting, bleak rural life -- Li's works could be set in Russia or post-War Italy, South America or India. Anywhere. And his movies would be recognised everywhere for their unsentimental, horrifying credibility.