小武

Unlike a lot of other contemporary Chinese films, Xiao Wu succeeds in gaining viewers empathy for the title character. We never really find out how the so-called "artisan pickpocket" got himself into the state he's in; it's almost as if he woke up one morning to find that he was alone and jobless at an age when he should be settling down like all of his friends. However, not knowing how he arrived at this point makes his growing desperation more tangible as we see him reaching out to everyone he can, only to be rejected.

Wang Hongwei is amazing as the title character, he makes it easy to relate to the character's loneliness and longing. Considering the actors in Xiao Wu are all amateurs, Wang's performance is even more amazing. Granted, he was given a great character to work with: in spite of his occupation, Xiao Wu is a nice guy. (His beautifully awkward relationship with the karaoke hostess is a fine example of this).

All in all, I think this is one of the best Chinese films from the past decade. The characters are better developed than in other contemporary films, and the story is neither contrived nor simplistic. Xiao Wu would seem to be a lot more accessible than other Chinese art films because it lacks the slow bits characteristic of that genre. I would highly recommend Xiao Wu to anyone interested in Chinese cinema.

I have seen the movie,but the quality of videotape is very bad,and cause the conversation is shangxi(a north province in china),so thought i am a chinese,i can't hardly hear it clearly.speak generelly,this movie reflect ture life condition in small town of china.many of people in town like xiaowu liang had been influenced deep by pop culture from Hongkong or China itself.and xiaowu is a poor low class in China.we are laughing when the movie play,but we are also shocked after the movie over.

The sound mixing is garbage, with a substantial amount of noise. The dialect cannot be understood. The camera is shaky. The performance is pretty amateurish. The pace is slow. All in all, this film is an unwatchable mess.

Xiao Wu is a pickpocket in Beijing. Stuck on the bottom rung of the criminal ladder despite his advance into adult years, he heads a small group of thieving street urchins who haunt the back streets of the city. Xiao Wu is a surly character, prone to throwing away his cigarette ends when in other people's homes. His time is whiled away with games of Mahjong and American pool played out in the street and he has few close friends.

Xiao Wu's brother, Xiao Yong, once himself a petty thief, is now a cigarette trader and brothel-owner. Xiao Yong, shamed by his criminal roots and his brother's failure to move on from the same position, excludes Xiao Wu from his wedding invitations and refuses to accept his wedding gift of ill-gotten money. Later on, Xiao Wu also discovers the shame that his hardworking parents feel for their pickpocket son.

A sense develops that the world is moving on and that Xiao Wu is being left behind; this is increased by the ongoing police-led evictions from the street where he spends much of his time – a new building project is on its way. Xiao Wu finds a glimmer of hope in his encounters with Mei Mei, an employee at the local brothel. The taciturn pickpocket opens up a little in her presence and the two of them bond, somewhat oddly from a Western perspective, through karaoke singing. Xiao Wu suddenly finds his singing voice when alone in a bathhouse; his plain voice resounds poignantly in the large, grimy, empty room. It is a rare moment of beauty.

When Xiao Wu buys a pager (state of the art in 1997) to keep in touch with Mei Mei it seems that he is starting to open up just a little to the changing world. But Mei Mei's sudden disappearance, along with his alienation from his family, leaves Xiao Wu without direction. A grim lack of purpose takes hold again. In the final frames of the film he is publicly humiliated, bringing the story to a sad end.

The footage in this film is much grainier than many people made be used to, but this is not necessarily a weakness: the image quality suits the grey, dilapidated city streets. The hand-held camera adds intimacy to the karaoke scenes and captures the distance between the two brothers as they walk separately through the same streets. The muffled state of the soundtrack takes some getting used to, but writer-director Zhang Ke Jia was clearly working on a limited budget for his first feature. The non-professional cast, however, is surprisingly effective; Hong Wei Wang is a real find, exuding a seedy charm in the lead role.

The Artificial Eye DVD which I watched this film on did not provide subtitles for many of the voices on radio and television, nor for some of the secondary characters, but there is an enormous amount of visual detail to take in as well. China simply does not feature enough on cinema screens, but this fine film suggests hope for the future.

This no budget film is shot with a hand held camera. It shows, but this does not affect the quality of the film. The director has made an intense movie about, Chinese street life. However the culture in China is very different from the west, we can see that the problems of little Wu are universal.