Dancing out of China

I'm depressed by a movie whose premise seems promising -- a premise that leads me to watch it despite mediocre reviews, suspecting that the reviewers either just didn't get it, or were overly focused on technical aspects that would appear less important to a cinematic layman like me -- but that so fails to live up to its promise that I leave the theater feeling cheated.

Last night I attended the Seattle opening of Mao's Last Dancer, a dramatization of the real-life story of Li Cunxin, a Chinese ballet dancer who defected to the West in 1981. Li's life is the very stuff of drama: born to and raised by a peasant family in provincial China; selected almost arbitrarily to study ballet in Beijing at the age of 11 (because Madame Mao decided she wanted a ballet company); forced to undergo strenous physical training for an alien art form that he didn't understand and didn't enjoy; transformed as a teenager from a hitherto lackluster dancer by his viewing of a videotaped performance by Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov; and, finally, his realization as one of the top performers at the Beijing Dance Academy, contrary to early expectations by his instructors. This rags to riches story alone would have made a fascinating movie.

But, wait, there's more. During a period of warming in Sino-American relations, Li's dance group was visited by officials of the Houston Ballet. The director was strongly impressed by Li's dancing, and invited him to spend three months with his company in Houston. Chinese officials were concerned with Li's "political readiness," but reluctantly agreed to the visit. In Houston, Li fell in love with another dancer, married her secretly, and decided to defect. He insisted on visiting the Chinese consulate to explain his decision. While there, he was seized, held captive, and was about to be flown back to China. Enormous adverse publicity, plus intense diplomatic discussions (then Vice President Bush was a patron of the Houston Ballet (who knew?)), led the Chinese to release Li, with the admonition that he'd never see China, or his family, again.

Years later, with liberalization in China, Li had become a hero -- although a politically unreliable one -- in China itself. His parents were secretly flown to the United States where they watched from the audience as Li danced an interpretation of Le Sacre du Printemps. They were brought up on stage to meet their astonished and emotionally overwhelmed son during curtain calls. ("Why are you dancing naked?" his father asks in Chinese. "Let's talk about it later," his son grins.)

All of this should have been great cinema. Somehow, however, it sounds a lot better on paper than it appears on film. The scenes shot in China are dramatic and seemingly authentic. The hardships suffered by all Chinese during the Cultural Revolution are touched on lightly, but convincingly. But the film's opening scene depicts Li's arrival in Houston, with subsequent flashbacks revealing his childhood and adolescence. These opening Houston scenes apparently were designed to contrast America, land of plenty and of freedom, with Maoist China, land of poverty and oppression. Li is shown bedazzled by the skycrapers and modernity of Houston (now eclipsed, of course, by the excesses of Shanghai), and marveling at the consumer goods heaped upon him by his host, the director of the Houston Ballet.

To me, the Houston scenes appeared pure, cheap Hollywood dreck. More footage was devoted to the director's leading Li around from store to store, buying him merchandise, and to showing him the wonders of Houston's disco scene, than was to the director's efforts to integrate him into his own ballet company. I confess to a strong distaste for Texas, at least to the media's routine portrayal of Texas, and most of all to Houston. The cultural elite looked and sounded like a bunch of moneyed snobs out of any one of a number of TV series set in that state. The entire Houston cast looked like a bunch of mediocre Hollywood actors. America in general came across as a country with too much wealth and far too much self-satisfaction.

Li's relationship with the woman he married was touching, at least in the early scenes, but by the time of his defection it was unclear whether he was staying in the U.S. for the sake of love, or for the sake of greater artistic freedom and much greater prosperity. Both, probably, but I couldn't help wondering if he wouldn't have made more of a contribution to ballet by returning home to his company in Beijing.

Li's marriage did not last -- according to the movie, because his wife's own dancing career could not be fulfilled in Houston. During his 18 years with the Houston Ballet, he remarried and finally moved to Australia, where he lives today and where he wrote the best-selling autobiography on which the movie was based. An interesting interview with Li appears on the first page of the Arts section in today's New York Times.

I wish I'd forgone the movie, and read the book.

P.S. -- But some of the ballet scenes, danced by a principal of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, are admittedly spectacular. Too bad the movie didn't present more ballet and less disco.