There aren’t a lot of movies that I’ve never heard of.I promise you that I say this with no ego.
I simply love pop culture - and movies, in particular. I love them to the extent that I spend hours on various entertainment websites reading about them, I feel perfectly comfortable just hanging out with my DVDs (they don’t judge me the way you just did), and I’ve decided to dedicate a summer series to the wonderfully random flicks my girlfriend brings home from the library.
One of those movies was "Mang Shan" (or "Blind Mountain" if don’t mind me getting all English on you). I’ll admit Chinese cinema isn’t my forte (is it ANYONE’S forte?), but I hear about most of the stuff that comes out, especially recently. (This movie came out in 2007.)
"Blind Mountain" is a drama set in the early 1990’s about Bai Xuemei (played by Lu Huang), a young, college-educated girl who is unwittingly sold as a bride to a vicious villager in Northern China. The rest of the movie traces her various escape attempts from the village, where this sort of arrangement has become reprehensibly acceptable.
That’s actually all there is to the story - and it’s a pretty great movie.
Director Yang Li tells the story in a non-flashy, pseudo-realistic style that could’ve been boring but ends up being totally compelling and engrossing. A big chunk of the credit has to go to Lu Huang, who makes the transformation from excited college student to a terrified young prisoner fighting for her life so believable that I audibly groaned whenever one of her escape attempts were foiled.
In the previous paragraph, I described the movie as "pseudo-realistic." That means that I have no idea whether the movie’s depiction of sex slavery in a Chinese village like the one in the movie came anywhere close to resembling real life. Though I suspect some aspects are exaggerated, what matters is that it feels real. The fact that this sort thing went on (and still goes on) in certain parts of the world serves as a scary and exhilarating puncture in our American culture bubble.
When the movie starts, it almost feels like you missed the first three minutes as we join Bai on what she thinks is a school-related trip. That disorientation ends up fitting in perfectly with the moment where Bai is drugged, abandoned by her companions and wakes up with a brutal new husband and extended family. As horrible as the husband was, I actually felt myself getting angrier at the hubby’s mother, who calmly and cruelly tells Bai to accept her fate. (What happened to looking out for a sister?) There are no time cards to tell us exactly how long Bai was in captivity, which also helps us get inside of her minset a bit.
It all leads to a provocative climax that might lead some (Erica) to say, "Huh?" but that others (me) find surprisingly satisfying.
I’d also probably file an obscure Chinese movie I’d never heard of until recently under "surprisingly satisfying." (Even if it shockingly didn’t feature any British Senior Citizen nudity.)
Blind Mountain...A
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