Communist China’s Cultural Revolution meets STAND BY ME. Surely the least likely high concept pitch in film history. Yet, here it is in Xiaoshuai Wang’s fine, semi-autobiographical film. Best known for BEIJING BICYCLE/’01*, Wang’s been very prolific, seven feature films after this, even more before, but this coming-of-age memoir from the 1975 tale end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution may well be the best entry point to his work. The title refers to young Wang Han’s eleventh year, the year he threw the household (kid sister, Mom, Dad) into a tizzy by insisting on a new white shirt when he’s chosen to lead his school in daily exercises. With Dad gone most of the week at his assigned factory job (pre-Revolution he was an actor), this uses up the family’s cloth ration for an entire year. Naturally, the prized shirt is quickly lost at play with his three devilish school pals. That’s the STAND BY ME part of the pic. They even come across a dead body, but unlike the boys in STAND, there’s not a budding, empathetic kid psychologist in the lot. Instead, rude, energetic, mean & hilarious id-driven engines of destruction. And it’s at play when Wang’s shirt goes missing, floating down a river his mother forbid him to play in. He’d have it back, too, if it weren’t for the murderer of the man they'd seen earlier. Yikes, the guy even knows him! Injured in a revenge killing of the man who raped one of Wang’s older classmates, the new shirt now a bandage for a bleeding wound. (The boy’s not sure who he’s more afraid of: a killer who might silence him or a mom who’s gonna murder him over that ruined shirt!) All this wonderfully brought off, often indirectly by Wang amid the trials of living as quietly normal a life as possible under the restrictive rules of the Cultural Revolution. Especially tough when your actor dad is already suspected as an intellectual and lover of Western culture. Rapt storytelling, handsomely shot, too, with a muted but enveloping color pallette (real film stock still in use in 2011?), and a superb mixed cast of actors and non-pro kids.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *For early Wang, try CLOSE TO PARADISE/’98 rather than his better known BEIJING BICYCLE/’01. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/so-close-to-paradise-1998.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/beijing-bicycle-2001.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Leave it to the blunt nature of Chinese social culture to make this ‘coming-of-age’ story end with a literal ‘cumming-of-age’ gag as Mom does the boy’s laundry.
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