While hardly holding a candle to Lou Ye’s impressionistic epic of Beijing life, “Summer Palace,” which played earlier this year, Li Yu’s independently produced “Lost in Beijing,” also dipping into politics and sexuality and mussing the hairs of the Chinese censors, who then slapped back at the director and producer with a ban on new work, is a pulpy glimpse of matters of money, fertility and relationships and future generations amid the teeming yaw of Beijing streets. The plotting is as complicated as the skies are smoggy in the telling, and the pulpy contrivances are not the equal of the film’s genuine vitality in moments of emotional conflict and sometimes in simply looking down the street. 112m.
