Shariq’s Département

The insightful documentary Up the Yangtze, playing at the Quad cinema, uses the creation of the Three Gorges Dam in China to explore changing aspects of Chinese daily life.  Peasants who are forced to move from areas being flooded must seek alternative forms of income to support themselves in a post-Communist economy where cash instead of a paternalistic communist government handout is necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, foreign tourists from the US, Canada and France are crowding tour boats along the Yangtze river to see this disappearing world before the flooding occurs. 

The movie documents the attempts of two young Chinese teenagers learning to work on these ships.  For the girl, Cindy, from an extremely poor family, she has to work and give up high school to support her peasant parents who are illiterate.  We watch her struggling to come to terms with the reality that she must forgo an education to feed her parents; the film juxtaposes images of fat American tourists gorging on plates of heaping buffet food to make the point that we live such wonderful lives in the West that we cannot imagine the difficulties others go through in the developing world just to survive.  I’d recommend you see this movie just to remind yourself that no matter how bad your life might seem to you, you have it pretty good!  One American woman leaving the cruise at the end of the movie congratulates a young Chinese aide/porter for not being as “obtrusive” on her cruise as she had feared.  She has a lot to learn.

The movie reminded me of another film about the Three Gorges Dam I saw a couple of months ago, the excellent Still Life, directed by the very talented Jia ZhangKe. 

This movie won the best picture prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and is successful in using the Dam to explore what the meaning of change is for two different protagonists: a man who is in search of a wife who left him many years ago, and in a parallel story, a woman who comes to the Three Gorges area to seek her husband who is involved in constructing a new bridge across the Yangtze.  The images in this movie are as real as the ones in the documentary (pre-flooding), and one almost thinks that the two movies must have been shot at the same time. 

But what is really interesting in Still Life is that Jhangke suggests that although change is occurring in China, people feel like they are trapped in a limbo as they wait for a future to arrive, not knowing what form it will take.  A pre-dam life has ended, but where do the people go from here?  The male protagonist is shown to be the wiser one, as he silently accepts life and seeks new possibilities when life does not go his way, accepting that the future will reveal itself in its own time.  The woman protagonist is more limited, struggling and crying as she realizes she has lost her husband, bewildered at fate’s hand.  She is stuck in the limbo, as probably many are in China, the movie suggests.  The movie is filmed in washed out colors and has many long takes, suggesting the faded, meandering quality of a life that is changing but is arrested, and has not yet fully birthed the future.