REVIEW
‘New World’
By Burl Burlingame
is beautiful
Star-Bulletin
THE promised new world of the near future is no longer brave, but it can be beautiful. It all depends on what you make of it. It it depends entirely on your definition of beauty. It won't be the same for everyone. Actually, it won't be the same for anyone.
That's the subtext in "A Beautiful New World," a charming film from China by director Shi Run Jiu that isn't a costume drama heavy on the irony, or a worker's-paradise dialectic. It is disarmingly slight, and light as a feather, and yet holds together -- one of the most difficult feats in filmmaking. This is one of the best films of the festival.
It's essentially a country mouse / city mouse tale. A dopey-looking fellow named Bao Gun (Tau Hong) has won a free high-rise apartment in Shanghai. One catch: When he journeys to the big city to collect his prize, he discovers it hasn't yet been built, and won't be for a couple of years. Catch two: Bao Gun is so obviously a yokel out of his element that the city sophisticates assume he's simple and easily manipulated. But appearances deceive.
So, seeking temporary lodging, Bao Gun looks up a distant relative, his aunt Jin Fang (Jiang Wu) and finds a motor-mouthed young woman with dreams far larger than her abilities. Jin Fang owes money all over town, and her schemes never pan out. She views this as temporary bad luck, however, and never knuckles down to work she considers beneath her. But she does have to wonder, on occasion, why her "fiance" left town and never calls anymore.
What: A Beautiful New World
It goes without saying that these two characters start to learn from each other, although both are bullheaded in their own ways. This isn't a conventional romance (although it appears headed that way) as much as it is a comical sketch on the self-denying power of dream and delusion.Although this is a thoroughly modern film, it will remind you most of the earnest socialist/populist comedies of the '30s and '40s by Frank Capra.
It's also a portrait of a new China, a jittery, construction-crazy economy with a focus on acquiring money and status, and littered with cultural influences from aboard, most of which seem at odds with "old" China. When Bao Gun arrives in Shanghai, he's a stranger in a strange land. But not so out of touch that he can't figure out how to make a buck or two. Or a couple of hundred.
Tech achievements are impressive in their restraint. Watch the scene in an underground train station as Bao Gun talks to a sullen guitarist; it's a small masterpiece of editing and camera angle.
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