VIFF Review: Lost In Beijing

I tell you, writing reviews is a great exercise of disagreements. I don't see or agree with a lot of what was written in the VIFF Calendar, about many of the films. This is why BR offers you guys our own readings, our own interpretations. And a space where we can debate these things.

While Yu Li's (Dam Street, Fish and Elephant) Lost in Beijing is a complex story not simply about spouse-swapping, or the influx of greed even in the most intimate of events, it is most of all a depiction of the ways power (and often men) presume they can make decisions on behalf of their lovers. In this film two men (Lin Dong & An Kun, a massage-parlour boss and a window-washer) discuss, behind closed doors with pen and paper, that a baby is worth 100,000, and value the assault of ones wife at 10,000 -- all the while presuming that they have the right to do so. It's mind-blowing how the violence just continues in this film: and all the while how systemic silence becomes and remains.

Despite the cinematic merit and brilliant shock-value in much of the movie, and despite it being a skillful parody of what may happen in Beijing or elsewhere (in terms of secret wife-swapping, betrayals, schemes, and lies), this film is nevertheless a visual mass-representation of the non-consensual, vicarious, sexual and verbal violence perpetuated against women, both well-off and aspiring working-class. It is a display of the power dynamics and abuse evident not just in the work-place (seen in the euphemistic massage-parlour) but also the psychological violence of an adulterous-come-rapist-boss-man who insists that his wife tolerate his new arrangement with An Kun, the husband of a girl he has raped. It is a display of tragic absurdities. A display of the complex agency and psychic setup that permits two intelligent women to relegate themselves to their idiotic spouses. It is a brutal representation of a wife who is raped twice in one day -- because her husband is throwing her out of the house, blaming her for embracing her boss in drunkenness, with absolutely no empathy for her in that event, and total absolution from tenderness, or care, or love.

As a film it is a masterpiece of violence, complexity, displays of provocative tensions among people, and a brilliant representation of the "narrowing options women have for self-fulfillment in China." But most importantly -- and this is where the film kicks itself in the face -- it fails in that it represents solidarity among genders existing strictly along gender lines, thereby perpetuating a mythical brotherhood and sisterhood that cannot be bridged and, in so doing, makes this film uber-pessimistic, dark, and tragically simplistic.

PICTURE CREDIT: VIFF Picture Database. Used With Permission.