The Talkies/A Great Wall
Bawer, Bruce
people. "If free elections were held tomorrow," gushes Time, "the 74-yearold Kadar would win by virtual acclamation." Of course, nasty little things like his executions and imprisonments are...
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...Chao refers obliquely to the Cultural Revolution: "Father passed away the year the chaos began...
...Rue, it does have its own fast food chain, City Burger, whose dubious offerings are apparently enough toappease the public taste for such things...
...Far from the recalcitrant oppressed who in 1956 tore down the gigantic statue of Joseph Stalin on Heroes Square and dragged it through the streets of Pest, today's Hungarians are freer and more prosperous than most of their Easternbloc neighbors...
...they drink Coke, though the taste makes them grimace...
...And certain characters—Grace Fang, for example—never do develop as fully as one might like...
...Paul's high-fashion American togs likewise provoke reproach from his Chinese kin: the boy's Calvin Klein trousers look to Chao like "work pants," his expensive jacket like a piece of "burlap sacking with patches...
...A GREAT WALL by Bruce Bawer As its title suggests, A Great Wall is a study in barriers—specifically, the cultural barriers between two branches of a family...
...No golden arches here...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 ing her mail, arguing that it's an invasion of her "privacy...
...For example, when Lili bicycles past the Great Hall of the People, we briefly see the por-traits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao...
...for to compare the cultural barriers between the Fangs and Chaos to the Great Wall of China is, I think, to prepare the viewer for a somewhat more pessimistic film than Wang (along with co-screenwriter Shirley Sun) has created...
...Lili uses the English word because, according to the film, there is no Chinese equivalent...
...But they are few and low-key...
...The latter sort of sequence—a simple, realistic vignette that is plainly and lovingly observed—is the sort at which Wang excels...
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...Yet on the whole this is an admirable piece of work—modest, sensitive, andperceptive...
...It doesn't get you anywhere...
...a public bathhouse and a school for fashion models, both of which Liu visits in search of work...
...Some of the young Chinese even behave like Americans...
...Interesting touches abound...
...When Lili tells him that she plays table tennis, he boasts, "Hey, that's my sport," and our expectation is that she is going to beat the pants off him...
...It lights up in the dark...
...It should be mentioned here that, in a manifest attempt to contrast studious Chinese and frivolous American youth, Wang gives us, in Paul, an almost unbelievably pinheaded California rich kid—a stereotype of the party-all-thetime West Coast mentality...
...But in fact Paul does very well, not only against her but against the best players the city has to offer—so well, in fact, that by the end of the summer (and the film) he makes it to the finals of the Beijing International Youth Ping Pong Tournament, where, before a large, anxious crowd, he vies for the championship with—who else?—Liu, his rival for Lili's attentions...
...So placid is present-day Hungary that the gradual-reform-through-trade theory is undeniably tempting...
...And Wang devotes plenty of attention to the Chinese young people's preoccupation with things West-ern, especially American: They sing American popular songs and Italian arias...
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...Paul is aggressively American...
...the other consists of Leo's sister (Shen Guanglan) in Peking, her husband Chao (Hu Xiaoguang), a re-tired government official, and their teenage daughter Lili (Li Qinqin...
...Definitely not the Gulag image...
...Ordinary observations about day-to-day life are fraught with political significance...
...In a way, the film's title is misleading...
...A Great Wall is, then, uneven...
...Aside from the ping pong tournament, there is a medical emergency sequence that seems gratuitous...
...You're no American...
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...To be sure, there is the occasion-al mild animadversion...
...During their time together, the two families observe, bewilder, amuse, and learn from each other, and eventually part to resume their separate (but somewhat altered) lives in their different worlds...
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...and they attend nightclubs where the dance music consists of extremely lame disco versions of "Oh Susannah" and "The Merry Widow Waltz...
...it makes the en-tire country into a campus...
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...Today on the anniversary of that revolution, the old certain-ties still remain—all 70,000 of them...
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...During my brief stay a black flag was hung from Matthias Church to signify the death of the cardinal-primate who succeeded Mindszenty, Laszlo Lekai...
...Even religion has been made palatable, once the government decided a little opium might be just the thing for a discontented populace...
...Largely this is because people everywhere, including Marxists, return to the old certainties in times of crisis...
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...but tonally inconsistent with the rest of the movie...
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...she berates Jan...
...In a totalitarian society even the innocent cannot avoid acquiring a revolutionary consciousness...
...Why do we have to do everything the Chinese way...
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...Chao complains to his wife, "I haven't seen Lili open a book") and instead dances around the house in American T-shirts, listening to tapes of rock music...
...Far more telling than the appeal of "goulash Communism" are its ancillary, aesthetic considerations...
...Of course, nasty little things like his executions and imprisonments are mentioned, but this sour note lies buried in the text, hidden to all but the most attentive reader—much as the bodies of General Secretary ladies victims lie hidden in Section 301...
...Even the attitude of the rulers toward their charges smacks of the paternalism of the university motto, in loco parentis...
...Wang takes us into a variety of settings: Lili's English class...
...Sometimes, to be sure, his reactions are entertaining, but more often than not they make him seem more vacuous than is humanly possible...
...We couldn't give him a proper burial...
...Politics are never explicitly mentioned...
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...There is a view of the Chinese class system in operation—the principal obstacle to the romance between Lili (daughter of a retired Party man) and Liu (who lives in a "junkyard" with his scholar father) seems to be that they are from different social levels...
...No wonder academics find it so enchanting...
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...Under the influence of her cousin Paul, she chides her mother for openBruce Bawer, a frequent contributor to the New Criterion, is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...a gym where children, ranged in military rows, practice their ping-pong serves...
...In sharp contrast to the defiance of Mindszenty and the crafty maneuverings of the Polish Church, the Hungarian Church under Cardinal Lekai was compromised and stripped of its animating spirit...
...This is, indeed, a film not of prodigious divisions or colossal confrontations between cultures but of fine distinctions between two families' attitudes, customs, and standards of living...
...This Karate Kid-type sequence is not only logically inexplicable (what is Paul Fang, who came to China with his folks for vacation, suddenly doing in an international sports competition...
...The film's strength, accordingly, resides largely in its convincing glimpses of the Chinese way of life...
...And when a handsome boy named Liu (charismatically played by one Wang Xio) falls for Lili, he at-tempts (in one of the film's more charming sequences) to woo her by reciting the Gettysburg Address in a fractured but exuberant English...
...She is supposed to be preparing for the all-important college entrance exam—as in Japan, only the very highest scorers will enter college—but Paul's genial indifference to such matters has infected her...
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...Rather than indulge (as one might have expected, given the current state of the celluloid marketplace) in facile, grandiose, and politically modish statements about the Walls Between Societies, Wang has quite remarkably created a film about people, a film lovingly attentive to its characters' every gesture, mood, peccadillo, and habit—a film, in short, vibrant with humanity...
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...Whereas even Paris's Champs Elysees now boasts a monstrous glittering Burger King, Hungary retains the (faded) dignity of the late nineteenth century...
...Why are you saying hi to strangers...
...Despite this rebuke, however, it is Lili, more than anyone else, whose head is turned by her American relatives...
...when Leo and his sister visit their father's shabby grave, Mrs...
...When, near the beginning of the movie, Liu and his friend Yu greet Lili and her friend Jan in the street, Lili is surprised at Jan's encouragement of their fresh advances...
...a small auditorium where a woman warbles a traditional Chinese melody about the Han Dynasty...
...That the Chao family is living under Communism is not so much of an issue here as one might expect, and in fact we are reminded of this circumstance only occasionally, and with Oriental indirectness...
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...One cannot help but think that the film would have been more interesting and believable—and the contrast between him and his Chinese counter-parts just as effective—had Wang given us a Paul who was intelligent and ambitious but who had made a career choice (to be a jazz musician, say) that for a student in Peking would be all but unthinkable...
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...On arriving in Peking, this spoiled boy is amazed to discover that his aunt's house has squat toilets and no shower bath, and he spends most of the remainder of his on-screen time doing typically American things that astonish his Chinese relatives (e.g., he affectionately smacks his father in the head) and reacting with naive amusement to Chinese mores...
...Yet for all the talk about the withering away of Marxist rule, East European Party leaders have proved themselves remarkably resilient...
...The episodic story concerns a summer vacation during which the Fangs visit the Chaos in Peking (where most of the film was actually shot, with real Red Chinese actors playing the natives...
...In 1956 this meant Russian troops...
...Unsurprisingly, it is Paul who is at the center of the film's most dubious subplot...
...So today there is no need for distasteful persecution of the hierarchy, because it has been given the perfect status for intellectuals: ceremony without substance, like the pomp surrounding Sarah Ferguson's wedding to Prince Andrew...
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...Say what you will, socialism puts a brake on the capitalist dynamo of change that makes so many uncomfortable...
...One branch consists of a highly successful San Francisco computer exec, Leo Fang (played by the film's director and co-writer, Peter Wang), his wife Grace (Sharon Iwai), and their college-age son Paul (Kelvin Han Yee...
...THE TALKIES...
...For my part, I managed to walk away with 175 Deutsche marks on a token bet...
...Although the brochures depict sultry Hungarian maid-ens, most of those in attendance the Saturday evening I entered appeared to be middle-aged German men, losing quite a lot of money...
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...Finally there is the appeal of the people themselves...
...When Leo tells his sister, for example, that he has quit his position after a disagreement with his boss (he believes he was refused a promotion because he's a "China-man"), the sister insists he has acted unwisely: "Never disagree with your leader...
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...a community center where old folks and youngsters alike sit glued to a TV screen, watching an opera performance...
...in the San Francisco sequence near the beginning of the film, he refuses to attend his Chinese I class and, when Leo scolds him for thus "deny[ing] his cultural background" (as well as for having a Caucasian girl friend), Paul counters that "all Chinese [i.e., Chinese-American] parents are racists...
...So fascinated is Lili by Paul that she begins to neglect not only her new admirer, Liu, but her studies ("Since your brother came," Mr...
...NY 10011 / Check one 1430917...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
