Electric Shadows Reviews

Writer-director Xiao Jiang's bittersweet tale of growing up in China during the 1970s starts in present-day Beijing with an inexplicable act of violence: A young woman (Qi Zhongyang) brutally beats an easygoing, movie-mad cyclist (Xia Yu) with a brick after he takes a spill in an alleyway. The victim, Mao Dabing, awakes in a hospital, his head bandaged and the police hovering at his bedside. He assures them he doesn't know his assailant, who's a deaf-mute and is at the same hospital being evaluated for a mental disorder. When Mao passes her in a hallway, she scribbles a note asking him to take care of her fish. As curious as he is puzzled, Mao takes her keys and goes to her apartment, a veritable shrine to movies that is filled with posters, pictures of film stars, a 16mm projector and, most intriguingly, a notepad in which the woman's entire life history has been rendered in storyboard form. Her tale unfolds in lengthy flashback: At the height of the Cultural Revolution, aspiring singer/actress Jiang Xeuhua (Jiang Yihong) delivered government radio broadcasts in a small rural township. Her refuge from dreary reality is Big Movie World, an outer theater whose repertory leans heavily toward Chinese films that uphold the ideals of Chairman Mao, interspersed with the occasional foreign film whose revolutionary sentiments pass muster. When Jiang finds herself pregnant by a faithless lover, she plans to avoid shame by scheduling an out-of-town trip that will allow her to deliver the baby in secret and put it up for adoption. But on the day Xeuhua intends to leave, she succumbs to the temptation to see the Albanian war drama Victory Over Death (1967) and goes into early labor at the theater. Shunned by her neighbors, Xeuhua holds her head high and raises her little girl, Ling Ling (Guan Xiaotong), alone. Ling Ling in turn befriends an unkempt, abused little hellion named Mao Xiobing (Wang Zhengjia), a closet movie buff, and projectionist Uncle Pan (Li Haibin), whose marriage to her mother sets in motion the events that culminate years later in the Beijing alleyway. Xiao's bittersweet film is superficially a swoony love letter to the cinema. But her valentine has a hidden sting, rooted in some hard truths about movie mania: Immersion in flickering fantasies can supplant engagement with real life, and no matter how much you love films, they'll never, ever love you back. (In Mandarin, with subtitles.)