Lost in Beijing

Ping Guo is a gem of a movie! I've been watching a lot of Chinese movies recently, but Ping Guo is one of the best of the bunch.

The story is about two couples intertwined due to unlucky circumstances, but most of them in their hands. During the movie, a very harsh and very real light is shed on the difference between poor and rich in modern Beijing and it will leave your mind thinking about it long after the movie is over. This is a very good thing - in my opinion movies are supposed to make you think, supposed to move you. Ping Guo did just that and is worthy of watching for everyone who isn't afraid of foreign movies and who is willing to look at something else than popcorn Hollywood.

This movie will keep you entertained for nearly two hours and will make you want for more movies of this director. And that's a very good thing!

This is a story about Liu, who works in a massage parlor (mostly just foot massages) for boss Lin Dong. After getting drunk with a friend from work who was fired, she gets raped by Lin Dong. It turns out, Lin's husband An Kun, a window cleaner just happening to be cleaning the windows at the time and witnessing this, tries to extort money from the boss. Liu becomes pregnant and there is a question of the unborn baby's paternity. Since the boss's wife Wang Mei is unable to bear children, Lin Dong wants badly to be a father, and makes a deal with the girl and her husband, that if its his baby, he'll keep it and give the couple $100,000 yuan. The film is at first farcical due to its unusual premise. It then becomes a strange morality play, that telling lies turns to pain. Beijing is pictured in every outdoor frame of the film as bustling, with constant high rise construction going on. However, I don't see specifically what relevance it has to the story, except to highlight haves and have nots (and want a lot mores). No joke here, it could have been "lost" in any decent sized city in the world. The real problem here is that there are no characters to like, except, to an extent, the wife of the boss, Wang Mei. This film, by the end, filled me with more indifference than pity or hope. I get it, money probably is everything. Everyone in this film made their bed and is now lying in it (the pun is completely intentional). If you have seen the actors in other films and like them, by all means go see this film. However, if you're not a giant fan of films made in mainland China, I'd skip it.

A lower class, working, married woman gets pregnant with lots of plot twists, money, moral dilemmas and human intrigue. If a travelogue/vocabulary brush up is your motive for watching there are some shots of Beijing looking bleak in winter, Tienamen Square, and the Forbidden City in the background during a conversation. My food-traveler mother wanted to know if there was food. With the key character being a pregnant female, she's eating all the time. If low-grade, sordid, masseuse/hooker scenes are what you seek, quit watching after the early drunken rape by boss scene. Otherwise that cutoff point is where you will quit watching, disgusted, wondering why the film wasn't cataloged as porn, but it is also exactly when the film gets interesting and stays interesting to the end. I started cleaning the kitchen at that point but checked in on the film running in the background just in case it redeemed itself. It did redeem itself, and turned out to be captivating.

China's weird. Didn't we just learn from the Olympic Committee that there's billions of people living there? I think we did. Why then is this one of only a few films I can think of, off the top of my head, coming from there that has any semblance of lived-life-now? Lived life now under peculiar circumstances, sure, because it is a movie after all, but still. Everything else seems to be costumed drama kung fu palace historical Mao-sanctioned fantasy crap. I'm talking mainland China here. Taiwan and Hong Kong don't count. Ang Lee doesn't count. All the Chinese filmmakers making films in other parts of the world, and getting them financed and released in other parts of the world, don't count—and there's the rub.

Lost in Beijing is banned in China and its filmmakers are banned for two years from making films in China. What kind of nonsensical time-out is that? I mean no disrespect to the Chinese, I just want more of them to fall through the cracks and make films like Lost in Beijing—which is nothing like Farewell My Hero's Kingdom of Flying Yellow Flowers.

Fan Bingbing, known in the west as Bingbing Fan, stars in this film as Liu Ping Guo (Ping Guo, the Chinese title, translates literally as "Apple"), a foot massage girl who is raped by her boss (played out-of-this-worldly great by Tony Leung Ka Fai who's been in enough movies that every Chinese citizen could pick a film of his to see without any two people seeing the same film—western audiences may know him as the guy who has sex with Marguerite Duras in The Lover), and the rape is witnessed by her husband, a window washer who just happens to be hanging from a scaffolding washing the windows of the room at the massage parlor where the rape takes place. Foot massage is big business in China so I guess that's why this massage parlor is some kind of skyscraper that needs these scaffolded window washers, but I digress. The husband sees this as an opportunity to milk a little money from the well to do parlor owner. Lost in Beijing turns a critical eye toward the new moneyed urban class set against the rural, immigrant-in-their-own-country, if you will, working class.

Bingbing's husband confronts Tony's wife with the rape news and demands money for his pain and suffering, yes, you read that right, his pain and suffering. Tony's wife laughs at him and suggests a better revenge would be for him to have sex with her, and then in a moment of barely noticed brilliance while she's riding him cowgirl puts sunglasses on him so she can't see him looking at her.

It turns out Bingbing is pregnant and things get a little more complicated. If you complain when a film uses overly convenient plot devices to move forward you probably won't like this film as much as I do. I'm more concerned with the caliber of the characters. All four of the main performances in Lost in Beijing are magnificent. (Tony's relationship with, and handling of, his over sized wallet/day-planner is hilarious, as is his response of randomly checking the top of his head for bald spots when he's busted for trying to use a mirror to peek at Bingbing in the shower.) The direction is good and the camera-work creative, sometimes a little too creative to the point where I got dizzy a couple times so I'm deducting a point for that. Beijing is the backdrop here, captured in all its beautiful gray and desolate self.

This is the first movie I've seen come out of Mainland China of respectable quality. I'll admit I haven't seen many, but from what I have seen, this is certainly above and beyond.

The story is about a poor migrant couple and a wealthy couple living in Beijing. Their lives become intertwined through a set of unfortunate and somewhat disturbing circumstances.

I'm not perfectly fluent in Mandarin, but the acting was good from all four main characters. The less experienced Bingbing Fang was especially good as Ping Guo, the lead character. The scenery is set amid the toxic haze of a sprawling Beijing with lots of greys and muted colours.

The best thing about the movie for me was the amazing contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor. Even though I'm surrounded by it daily, this movie gives a little bit more intimacy than what I'm normally exposed to. Other common themes were greed and face.

Ultimately, the production values of the movie were very good, from the cinematography to the acting, but the conclusion doesn't really leave you with a good taste in your mouth. I think this is good though, because it sticks closer to what reality might be like, instead of having clearly defined heroes and antagonists with a full circle ending.