The Chinese Botanist's Daughters (Les Filles du botaniste) [2006] • France, China

There has to be a million movies made which ask us to sit through watching some man be a complete asshole so that we can witness the long suffering of the women around him. Often there is a subtext or symbolic undercurrent that the characters and their relationships are meant to represent. This is one such movie.

The asshole in this film is the Chinese botanist and he represents a tyrannical and repressive society. He makes ancient herbal remedies in a botanical paradise he has constructed on an island that is supposed to be somewhere in Yunnan Province, China. The long suffering woman in the film is his twenty year old daughter. She waits on him hand and foot. She cuts his toenails. She represents all that is good and new and wonderful yet shackled in the modern world.

The film has good intentions and attempts to expose some of the lingering absurdities of Chinese traditional values in general and those of the Cultural Revolution in particular. One day another young woman arrives on the island to intern with the botanist. She brings a talking bird that squawks "Long live Chairman Mao" all the time. The two women fall in love, the father sees this forbidden love in the flesh and dies of a heart attack. Really. The two young women are put to death for the crime of the disease of homosexuality that caused the death of a prized botanist.

The director wants to make a point of how fucked up the situation is but he takes it to a ridiculous extreme, much like the film's soundtrack of crescendoing choruses and violins. It's too bad because the film has a strong and very sensual visual appeal. As mentioned, the film's location is supposed to be somewhere in Yunnan, one of the most beautiful places in the world, but because of the homosexual content Chinese authorities prohibited the director from filming there. The irony. So it's filmed in Vietnam where it's green and lush and dripping wet. If all the scenes of the father being an idiot were removed The Chinese Botanist's Daughters would be a gorgeous film.

Sijie Dai, the film's writer and director, was sent to a reeducation camp as a young man during the Cultural Revolution. He's clearly exorcising demons and I would like to applaud his efforts but while the theme of The Chinese Botanist's Daughters is worthwhile the particulars are schmaltzy, unpleasant, and far too melodramatic. Dai's earlier film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a much better film dealing with the Cultural Revolution.

Mylène Jampanoï, who stars as the woman with the talking bird, went on to star in the French extreme horror film Martyrs.

★★

Director: Sijie Dai
Starring: Mylène Jampanoï, Xiao Ran Li, Ling Dong Fu, Wei-chang Wang

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Red River (Hong he) [2009] • China

Another film starring Jingchu Zhang. This woman is surprising me. I have seen, and liked, her bit parts in Overheard and Protégé, a couple manly pictures where the female roles amount to no more than looking good, which she does very well, and assisting the story arc of the manly men moving forward, which she does very well. I didn't imagine her being capable of so much more than that. Ann Hui gave her a starring role in a film I recently reviewed, Night and Fog, and Zhang owned that film. So here comes Red River, another starring role.

The film didn't make a big splash and seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle of the many films that were produced to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Communist China. I'm not entirely sure of what connection this film has to that celebration because many of the cultural particulars were lost on me. The film is set near the Red River at the border of China's Yunnan Province and Vietnam. Problem is, Zhang is a Mainland Chinese woman playing a young Vietnamese girl and the other three stars are Hong Kong actors. The dialog seems to drift between some Mandarin dialect and broken Vietnamese—phonetically spoken by the Hong Kong actors—and I couldn't keep a firm grip on who was supposed to be Chinese and who was supposed to be Vietnamese or when things were supposed to be happening in China, or in Vietnam. Things become clearer as the film goes on but while I was working through it, I was confused.

Setting all that aside, Red River is also a rather sweet gender-swapped Oedipal love story interrupted by gangsters. The story starts off with a brief prologue set in the Vietnam war era seventies. A little girl, Ah Tao, witnesses her father being blown to bits by a land mine when they're flying a kite together. Big Bummer, that. It then jumps to the nineties with Zhang playing Ah Tao, all grown up but suffering mentally from the trauma. She's working as a cleaner in a massage parlor (in China) owned by her aunt who has a friend, Ah Ha (Cheung), who happens to look a lot like Ah Tao's father. Ah Ha discovers Ah Tao has a marketable singing voice so he's nice to her while trying to make money off her by charging people a couple dollars to Karaoke with her. The aunt also has a wealthy and cruel gangster client who's pissed off because he had a leg blown off in the Vietnam War, and he takes an interest in ah Tao because, since she's mentally challenged, she doesn't know enough to avoid him. Ah Tao's affection is for Ah Ha, because he's nice to her and he doesn't kill people for a living—and the other thing—so she runs off with him. This angers the gangster who chases after them to get her back. Tragedy and trouble ensue. Things end sadly.

So much for the story. I really like Zhang's performance. Playing a mentally challenged person is a tough role. More often than not actors resort to obnoxiousness and slobbering to get the point across. Zhang plays it sweet and clean. A Variety reviewer calls Zhang's performance too "one-dimensionally wide-eyed" to be convincing. She is wide-eyed, to be sure, and she may be one dimensional, but her dimension comes off as childlike freedom, unencumbered by the nuances of modern bullshit living that clobber any hope for happiness. That's the beauty of the way Zhang plays it. Her handicap is a freedom to approach the world in a state of honest and hopeful wonderment. She's seems happy scrubbing floors and singing for people, and Zhang does a fantastic job bringing that to life.

I may object on principle to the film business habit of having drop-dead gorgeous women with perfect skin, hair, teeth, and nails playing mentally retarded Vietnamese refugees scrubbing floors in massage parlors—but not in practice. Zhang is both beautiful and talented. She's pleasant to look at and she does a good job.

★★★★

Director: Jiarui Zhang
Starring: Jingchu Zhang, Loletta Lee, Nick Cheung, Danny Lee
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