Bilgi :Shanghai Dreams seems offset by a generation. It takes place during writer/director Wang Xiaoshuai’s teenage years in the mid-1980s; the setting is a small county town where a family, led by patriarch Wu Zemin (Yan Anlian), moved from Shanghai to live and work during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. That particular Revolution concluded and his children growing up, Wu Zemin longs to return to the wonders of Shanghai, a dream of vague specifics but which signify financial prosperity, secure and hopeful futures for the children, and a social and physical environmental standard far above the local scene. But Wang’s story is not of Wu Zemin’s dislocated sense of livelihood, politics, and happiness, where idealism for China’s “Third Front” in the countryside has aged into nostalgia for the metropolis. Rather, this rather unique narrative is sidelined by the story of the family’s teenage daughter Qinghong (Gao Yuanyuan), who has to live day after to day with her tyrannical father’s attempt to preen and hone his daughter’s upbringing in preparation for a hypothetical future in Shanghai. The result is a nostalgic, banal, and by-the-books story of teenage repression which translate to longings for transgressions, be they love, a new pair of heals, an underground dance club, or, radically for Wu Zemin, a simply, happy life in the countryside. Qinghong’s story, while unremarkable, is interesting in that in the same years in which her father was filled with an idealism to leave the exalted life of the city to improve China’s countryside, for his daughter, who has grown up in the small town and ironically acquired an unstated affection for it, are full of different, but equally formulative experiences based on location. But from the sound of it, Wu Zemin’s young adulthood was not nearly as typical and was far more a clash of cultures, traditions, and politics; Qinghong’s turmoil seems one step removed from everything historically, politically, and socially important from the era, getting only the watered down experiences from a time when the ideals of the previous generation were fading into the pessimism of current reality.
The primary success of the film is in its visual aspect, a combination of Wu Di’s slowly moving, tightly zoomed, medium-shot photography, the actual location of the film, and Zhang Wu’s detailed art design. The look, while sometimes making the small town too pretty in its physical malaise (Wang irritatingly marginalizes the large, modern apartment blocks that clearly prominently exist in the town as well), nevertheless emphasizes the striking-ness of the town, its etched sense of having been lived in and used by real people. One particular stepped hill is featured prominently, and feels at once like a piece of the town that is an everyday part of walking to school or home for work, and at once something more poetic—a respite or burden, a hope or a brutal reminder it is impossible to say because the film purposely isn’t working with symbols like that, but its importance to the people of this small story is clear. While fairly romanticizing Wang’s nostalgia by aestheticizing the country location in feeling of statis similar to that of Hou Hsiou-hsien’s historical films, this technique nevertheless successfully envisions precisely the kind of environmental detail, beautiful and ugly alike, which so impresses itself on the young Qinghong.
There is a sequence towards the film’s end where all of Qinghong’s pressure from her father, her feelings over a girlfriend who recently eloped with a marriage youth, and her own feelings for a local boy unapproved by Wu Zemin culminate into a predictable climax. But the way Shanghai Dreams precise atmospheric visual detail is suddenly utilized for some vitality in the story, some passion, and some threat, despite the generic events that occur the film momentarily feels like something more than a director’s wistful nostalgia over his tumultuous, but fairly representative, teenage years. Such vitality flows through Wu Zemin’s oppressive antics, but Yan’s performance is too over the top for a film whose heroine is deathly silent, whose boyfriend nothing more than a wordless metaphoric stand-in, and whose chats with her girlfriend over local boys, love, Shanghai, and pop songs—everything feels like every other film that has ever tackled a similar age of youth, including the characteristically over the top memory of the father’s temper. Wu Zemin’s explosiveness and cruelty are indicative of how strong his own story is, a story that serves as a framing device and tragically not as the center of focus. If the movie had actually been about Qinghong living this town, rather than specifying the story to Qinghong living in this town under the wrathful eyes of her father's Shanghai dreams, it might have been something notable. The movie ends with a dedication to Wang’s parents, but considering the harmlessness of the story it seems like a movie about them rather than their offspring would not only be more vital, evocative and more powerful, it would also do them a better service. |
