Mao’s Last Dancer (***)

So many American films view foreign culture through an American lens, but this one (actually Australian) is about America viewed through the lens of a young Chinese man. Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) was doubly sheltered, having not only been raised in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, but also having spent his teen years in the cloistered environment of an elite ballet school. The movie begins with his arrival in Texas in 1979 for a summer stint with the Houston Ballet, an exchange arranged by Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), the Ballet’s artistic director. Director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) follows a conventional flashback structure in showing Li’s early life, and these scenes are compelling. However, they’re brief and only extend back to the day Li is plucked from his classroom to audition for a chance to train as a ballet dancer. Li’s excellent memoir, on which the film is based, includes multiple chapters about his life in a small village as a boy.

Understandably for a film made for an English-speaking audience, Beresford and screenwriter Jan Sardi focus on Li’s time in America. They certainly capture the ideological and cultural gulf between Maoist China and 1980s Texas, but de-emphasize the abject poverty that was the salient feature of everyday life in rural China. It’s the kind of poverty that is alien to the vast majority of Americans, and the passages in the memoir describing the enormity of that hunger and privation are not merely sad but also among the most fascinating.

In what it does portray, the movie commendably sticks very close to the facts, including in portraying the international incident that occurred when Li decided not to return to China. However, what is moving on the page can be mildly clichéed when telescoped into a two-hour film. On the other hand, getting to see the ballet sequences, so beautifully performed and filmed, is something the memoir couldn’t provide. Cao was clearly chosen for his dancing skills, not his acting, but Greenwood is quite good as the English-born Stevenson. These things and the novelty of Li’s story make the drama enjoyable to watch. Indeed, it has much of the appeal of Shine, another inspirational biopic with a screenplay by Sardi.

IMDB link

viewed 8/12/10 at International House and reviewed 8/13 and 8/28/10