Can anyone master any aspect of modern China? Not even its bureaucrats and commissars and Army seem capable. For a Westerner with better-than-average knowledge of cultural currents, a few remarkable exports seem to arrive each season. In film alone, the U.S. has recently seen releases of “Summer Palace,” a film about a young woman’s coming of age that mingles strains of Truffaut and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and the magical miserablist Jia Zhang-ke’s “Still Life” and “Dong,” one a fictional film, the other a semi-documentary about life in the Three Gorges area of China where for years rising waters have been covering thousands of years of civilization (Canadian-Chinese director Yang Chung’s “Up the Yangtze” also opens this week). Trimmed by Chinese censors before its Cannes debut, Li Yang’s 2007 “Blind Mountain” (his second feature after 2003’s pulpy “Blind Shaft”) is an often-beautiful film about brutal occurrences, largely the things that happen to a young woman who’s sold in the early Nineties to a family who farms pigs. As part of a “sixth generation” of Chinese filmmakers, Li has not yet succumbed to the neutral pictorialism of his predecessors. The ending is a cataclysm, but likely a daily occurrence in the uncharted territory of that vast land. 97m. (Ray Pride)
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