Suzhou River
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s increasingly apparent that Hollywood is the main supplier of master narratives to national cinemas around the globe–with a few interesting exceptions, such as India, which still has an autonomous film industry. Other countries–including mainland China, Taiwan, and Iran–have been inundated only recently with commercial American pictures and consequently have been able to develop their own traditions independently. But this doesn’t mean that Hollywood or would-be Hollywood movies aren’t the models for many films being made today in those countries. I recently spent a few days at the Rotterdam film festival and walked out after only a few minutes of a feature from mainland China that was the same kind of sleazy, violent, and thoroughly routine American-style thriller other Asian countries have been grinding out for years. I assumed the festival was showing it only because it had the novelty of coming from mainland China, but it’s depressing that this kind of boilerplate crap can now be found even in that country.
A few days after I left Rotterdam I went to the Fajr film festival in Tehran–my first trip to Iran–where I was a member of the international jury. One of the films I saw was an American-style thriller by the highly popular and prestigious Iranian filmmaker Bahram Beizai that had the unfortunate English title of Killing Rabids (when Deborah Young recently reviewed it in Variety she sensibly retitled it Killing Mad Dogs). It’s just the sort of Iranian movie that never gets shown in the U.S., partly because its Hollywood influences could be viewed as a strike against it–it doesn’t have the purported exoticism of most Iranian art films, yet it doesn’t quite live up to the slickness of a classic Hollywood genre film–and partly because its allusions to local government corruption are hard to pick up if you’re not Iranian. Furthermore, its heroine with guts of steel (played by Beizai’s wife, Mozhde Shamsai, who won my jury’s prize for best actor) stares down the misogynist villains at every opportunity–a type that would have had more commercial cachet in this country 15 years ago but now seems slightly passe.
It’s also worth noting that the mermaid figure is another Western hand-me-down, without any apparent Chinese counterparts. But Lou Ye puts a global spin on this notion: “Mermaids don’t exist in China; the whole idea is a Western import, like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s–everything Fifth Generation filmmakers refused to admit as Chinese….But how can you draw this line? As a child, I can remember my parents telling me Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid.’ And when did my parents first hear it? It’s impossible to say. This, I think, is a very important difference with filmmakers of my generation. We’re not interested in being cultural immigration officials saying, this is Chinese, this is not Chinese.”
