Showtimes & Tickets Enter Zip Code:

LOST IN BEIJING
Directed by Li Yu
Written by Li Yu & Fang Li
Produced by Fang Li
Director of Photography, Wang Yu
Edited by Zeng Jian
Released by New Yorker Films/Red Envelope Entertainment
Starring: Tony Leung Ka Fai, Fan Bingbing, Tong Da Wei & Elaine Jin

The moving Lost in Beijing is one of the best Chinese exports in many years, a scathing look at the rapidly changing moral and socio-economic climate in China’s capital. In the wonderfully written knot of a narrative, Pingguo (Fan Bingbing) is a masseuse at Dong’s (Tony Leung Ka Fai) bustling foot massage parlor. Pingguo’s window washer husband, An Kun (Tong Da Wei), improbably witnesses Dong’s rape of a drunken Pingguo and in it finds the perfect opportunity to blackmail the wealthy, and married, business man. But the plot continues looping forward as Dong refuses to pay any money to An Kun, until he finds out that Pingguo is pregnant. An Kun, like his wife, is a young recent migrant from a poor village in China’s Northeast, and senses an opportunity to become part of the rising middle class.

Li and her producer Fang Li have devised an emotionally disturbing story. Augmented by brilliant performances and striking cinematography, the film creates a sense of what the new Beijing is like in a period of a significant economic boom. Without any references to the past, the multiple subplots lay out the myriad changes the city has undergone and how the rise class of the “nouveau riche” is changing the landscape.

Only meager redemption is found for these characters, who repeatedly turn on each other and on themselves, forging alliances and abandoning them as part of a greater design that never goes as planned. Everything and every one have a price. It’s no wonder that the sexually-charged film has caused such a stir with the strict Chinese censors. Li paints a dark portrait of the changes brought by the city’s growing wealth, resonating with many pre-WWII American films, in which immigrants to the burgeoning city are subjected to the mental tortures of the elusive American Dream. This, in part, is why the film works so well thematically. It is not just a story about China and its changing social hierarchy. It delves into themes that are so universal that the story is not only a poignant allegory of modern Chinese life; the city of the title could be replaced with any metropolis of the world. Dustin L.Nelson
January 25, 2008