Lost in Beijing
August 2008 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Lost in Beijing is out on DVD just in time for the Summer Olympics, so we can see what life is really like behind the stadiums in smoggy Beijing. It’s a story about the city’s new wealth and the greed and sorrow it engenders. Lost in Beijing was in trouble with the Chinese government from the start. Yu Li, its 31-year-old female director, and Fang Li, its producer, first ran afoul of the censors by submitting the film to the Berlin Film Festival without permission. After 52 various deletions, it was finally released in mainland China. With four of China’s major actors and explicit sex, it was a hit. But after only a month, it was pulled from the theaters. China is trying to clean up both its air and its image.

A chance episode entangles the lives of two couples, rich and poor, middle-aged and young. Lin Dong (Tony Leung Ka Fai) owns an upscale foot-massage palace that employs 50 young women to slap the feet and pound the backs of his affluent male clients. Lin rapes one of them, Liu Ping Guo (Bingbing Fan), when he comes upon her drunk and alone. By coincidence, her husband, An Kun (Dawei Tong), a window washer dangling outside in his harness, witnesses the rape. He’s not going to let the rich guy get away with it. Blackmail and extortion don’t work, but he gets some revenge by sleeping with Lin’s wife (Elaine Jin). (Curiously, onscreen sex between an older woman and a younger man is forbidden by the Chinese censors, although the reverse is not.) An Kun gains his real leverage when he discovers that his wife is pregnant and that Lin is longing for a son. The screenplay presents the conflict between the two greedy men as satiric and tragic with Ping Guo as a victim they share. No one wins in the contest. Lin’s Mercedes-Benz is the great symbol of his power, and as the credits roll over the final image, we see the two men, working together at last, pushing the stalled car through Beijing traffic.

The acting is superb. Yu Li’s direction is subtle, and the cinematography of Wang Yu complements it. The camera is often held on the faces of characters who are alone and in thought. Their states of mind make a gradual change that is visible but wordless. Dong Lin’s elegant wife, played compellingly by Elaine Jin, is hardened and embittered by her husband’s infidelities, but when she’s alone at the wheel of her car a single tear slips down her cold face.

Much footage is given to Beijing itself, its immense skyscape, forever hazy and gray, as well as the life in the streets with its jumble of affluence and poverty on the move. The great contrast in the apartments of the poor and the rich couples is told through the color palettes -- gray and dim in one case and burnished, rich, and softly lit in the other. The audio options are either Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0 stereo, but the sound is mostly dialogue, with English subtitles. There are no special features except a trailer. A tri-fold pamphlet with a few reviews is included.

Beijing is undergoing an economic development so rapid its citizens must gamble with moral situations they never faced before. Women in particular become pawns in the game. But men and women alike are lost in Beijing. No wonder the censors would prefer we didn’t see this film.

• Go Back