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W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
MAO'S LAST DANCER (2009)
TRANSMISSION PICTURES
d. Bruce Beresford; pr. Jane Scott, Ling Geng; scr. Jan Sardi; book. Cunxin Li; ph. Peter James; ed. Mark Warner; m. Christopher Gordon; prod d. Herbert Pinter; cast. Chi Cao, Bruce Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan, Amanda Schull, Joan Chen, Wang Shuang Bao, Alice Parkinson, Jack Thompson (117 mins)

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Resilient Personal Success, Chinese Humanism & the Demystification of Communist Ideology

The story of Li Cunxin is both a remarkable demonstration of the resilience of the human identity and a passionate demystification of the traditional Western-US view of Chinese Communism as oppressive and totalitarian.

THE REAL LI CUNXIN

CHI CAO INTERVIEW

Born into a peasant family in the Shandong province, his mother having seven children – a traditional “hero-mother” at a time when Mao and the Communist Party were encouraging large families (the result being a population boom which later necessitated the official one-child policy) – Li is selected to attend ballet school in Beijing. There – after much doubt and effort – he gradually excels and is invited by a visiting American artistic director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) to perform with the Houston Ballet, where he soon becomes a star performer. In America, Li (played as an adult by Birmingham ballet star Chi Cao) falls in love with a fellow dancer (Amanda Schull) and wishes to stay. His desire to remain in the USA, however, contravenes the Communist Party intent to have him return to Chinese political dance, facilitating a standoff within the Chinese Embassy.

PREVIEW

Li’s life-story, based on his recent best-selling autobiography, is dramatized brilliantly in Australian director Bruce Beresford’s film of Mao’s Last Dancer. What is surprising though is not merely the emotional resonance and affectation of Li’s tale of self-discipline and self-actualization through dance, but director Beresford’s cautiously sympathetic handling of Chinese Communist Party history and ideology.

On the surface description of events, the Communists initially provide Li with the opportunity to achieve his ambitions but when he seeks to assert his individuality by wishing to remain in the USA the Communist response is to put politics above humanity and insist that he return. It is that clash that subtly infiltrates Beresford’s film, between individuality (so highly praised in the West) as the quality which Li responds to when in the USA and thus gradually embraces as a means to free his dance style from the dictates of political dance in China and Communist collectivism wherein the Party identity is superior to individual will in the pursuit of a utopian nationhood.

In this, Beresford’s careful integration of flashback scenes involving Li’s parents (Joan Chen and Wang Shuang Bao), the fierce selection process to get into the Beijing Academy and the subsequent politicization of dance to serve a revolutionary agenda suggests the regimented discipline of the Party and the cultural importance of Li as its representative in the USA.

For the Party, Li has a responsibility over and above his own self-interest (even above his own personal freedom); as a Chinese, he must sublimate his individuality to the Party and accept their intentions for him. His refusal to do so, his assertion of individuality and self-interest in the pursuit of individual freedom and liberty defies the superiority of the Party and they respond with due force. However, the pressures of the West, specifically media attention, impact even the Party who (under duress) allow Li the opportunity to pursue his individuality on condition that he never return to China to see his family.

The Regimen of Dance Training at the Beijing Academy

Importantly, the Chinese Embassy official finally asks Li what he wants, deferring to Li’s individual desires above those of the Party – a symbolic moment, no matter how initially pressured it may have been.

Subsequently, although “free” to achieve his success as a dancer, Li lives with constant nightmares, fears of Communist Party reprisals against his family (many of which were implied in an effort to convince him to return to China) haunting him as his relationship faces collapse, his new wife having dreams and ambitions of her own and knowing that her interests may conflict with those of her new husband. Li’s passion and conviction for dance soon make him into a star and with the passage of time, his repatriation into Chinese identity may be possible. There is an old saying that director Beresford evokes here without ever quoting directly – “time heals old wounds”. Thus, in the film’s one final spectacular dance number, director Beresford stages the film’s most astonishing moment, devastating in its emotional and political complexity as it acknowledges the increasing humanism of the Chinese Communist Party, the reconciliation of individual will and political intent, and the triumph of family.

Mao’s Last Dancer is thus empathetic with all sides of the argument and refuses to simply demonize the Chinese Communists as oppressors in the manner of so many Western films.

Hero-Mother (Joan Chen) sees her son off to the Party

Here, the rigid control of the Party is evoked in a number of scenes – a ballet teacher who dislikes the politicization of dance is forcibly removed from his position – but so too is the political process that sees Mao’s widow imprisoned and Li eventually (albeit reluctantly) allowed to pursue a life in the West, thanks in part to the efforts of his human rights and immigration lawyer (played by a reserved and restrained Kyle MacLachlan) as the Chinese authorities also must confront a Westernized ethic of individual liberty. Indeed, the skilful incorporation of a sequence involving the fate of Li’s parents in Communist Party hands after Li’s seeming betrayal of the Party by remaining in the demonized West (where he says he can dance with more freedom) evokes a view of stern Communist reprisal only to subvert it in the film’s masterful, concluding dance number.

Indeed in the final scenes, Beresford suggests a humanized Communist China now in existence, having grown through Mao’s revolutionary fervour into confronting the Western ethic of liberty and individualism and beginning to recognize the triumph of the individual Chinese effort as much as the collective idealization of China as a nation.

It is Li’s tale that epitomizes this journey within the Chinese national character. And it is the essential humanism here that finally transcends political barriers and spreads a message of co-operation and reconciliation that is both heart-warming and breathtakingly realized in brief but stunningly designed production numbers choreographed by Peter James. However, the film is not a musical and the dance numbers serve to illustrate the demands of the story, finding considerable variety in their staging, building to the climactic moment when the dancer who left China to dance in the USA because he felt freer as a dancer can face the possibility of a return to China and dance with the same freedom.

Mao’s Last Dancer is a stunning film achievement. Emotionally resonant and politically complex within a subtle narrative structure balancing present and past, it is director Beresford’s finest film to date.