Shanghai Dreams

(Wang Xiaoshuai, China)

By Jason Anderson

The parallels between Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Cannes Jury Prize-winning Shanghai Dreams are patent, and not only because Wang memorably appeared as a sleazy, karaoke-loving businessman in Jia’s latest. Both movies seem to reflect the loosening of the government restrictions that have hampered Sixth Generation filmmakers—this marks the first time the Film Bureau has given Wang free rein, his previous aboveground features So Close to Paradise (1998) and Beijing Bicycle (2001) having provoked censorship battles—and the adopting of more polished, arguably more conventional approaches by the filmmakers themselves.

Whereas in The World Jia amplified his visual panache and tightened up his narrative skills, Wang leaves behind the mixed-up youngsters of Frozen (1996) and Drifters (2003) in order to make a stately stab at family melodrama. Though not as audacious as Jia’s films, Shanghai Dreams is remarkable not only for its precision and slow-building emotional power, but the way it extends its teenaged characters’ feelings of confusion and hopelessness to the community around them. As is so often the case in a Sixth Generation movie, the kids aren’t all right. Yet their middle-aged parents are no better equipped to handle the crises depicted here.

In the mid-60s, the Chinese government formed a “Third Line of Defense” against potential Soviet incursions by relocating urban factory workers inland. Like Wang’s own family, his film’s central characters were sent from Shanghai to a backwater town in the rural province of Guizhou . Two decades later, the death of Mao and the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping raised these families’ hopes that they could return. In the intervening years, the film’s patriarch, Wu Zemin (played by Yan Anlian in a wrenching performance), has grown embittered and argumentative. Convinced that their stay was always meant to be temporary, he has never allowed his family to consider Guizhou their home.

Naturally, his teenaged daughter, Wu Qinghong (Gao Yuanyuan), is more uncertain about her proper place. Badgered by her father to study hard so that she can go away to university, she feels the pull to create some kind of life for herself there. Even so, she has broken off a relationship with a local boy to appease Wu Zemin. Qinghong’s best friend Xiao Zhen (Wang Xueyang) is more brazen about defying the older generation, wondering, “What’s so great about Shanghai ?” Unbeknownst to her own transplanted parents (who are far less strict than Wu Zemin), she has a romance with Lu Jun (Qin Hao), a would-be tough who favours the era’s provincial-Chinese-badass look: wide-collared shirts, big sunglasses, and plaid bellbottoms. The scene in which the ghetto-fabulous Lu Jun makes like Travolta to Boney M’s “Gotta Go Home” during a clandestine dance party is the cheeriest moment in a movie otherwise dominated by rainy gloom.

Yet Shanghai Dreams is more eventful than Drifters, Wang’s previous feature about young people torn between two places (there, the contemporary story of a man who returns to China after being deported from the US ). One reason for that is Wang is more interested in the fates of the families rather than the individuals. Though much of the first hour is devoted to Qinghong and Xiao Zhen, Wu Zemin eventually emerges as the most fascinating character and the film’s most deeply tragic figure. He begins as a stern taskmaster, but as a potential move to Shanghai coincides with unforeseen tragedy, this persona slips away to reveal his own feelings of fear and desperation. Since he’s worked so hard to protect his daughter, it’s deeply affecting to see him realize that he’s failed her.

This fraught father-daughter dynamic has always been a potent engine for melodrama. No wonder Shanghai Dreams’ final scenes are reminiscent of those moments in Visconti’s movies when neo-realism gives way to bold operatic grandeur (the whiff of Rigoletto is hard to miss). Until then, Wang plays it relatively subtle—his patient, nuanced evocation of the mundanity and sudden revelations that define teenage existence recalls Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991). There’s arguably a link to Jia’s Platform (2000), too, but Shanghai Dreams is more boldly emotional than any of Jia’s cooler-tempered films. Though some may castigate Wang for his tearjerking tendencies, he creates a satisfying balance of melodrama and stylistic austerity. With Shanghai Dreams, Wang clearly allowed himself to dream a little bigger. Unlike that of the family he portrays, one modelled after his own, Wang’s fate is far from disastrous.

Shanghai Dreams

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