China Is for Insects; America Is for Winners!

The director of Mao’s Last Dancer, Bruce Beresford, is the same Australian who directed Driving Miss Daisy. However, the only thing the two films have in common is the director.

Nothing in Driving Miss Daisy throws light on Mao’s Last Dancer—and the same is true the other way around. Each film stands on its own. The director, the sole connector of these films, is also the kind who makes no impression on his films. You cannot say what a Beresford film looks and feels like. He has the ability to simply dissolve into the film and leave no traces. The same cannot be said about God, who can be seen nowhere in creation but whose traces are found everywhere in creation. One trace is the way certain wasps drop water into their nests to cool them. This form of insect air-conditioning is one of God’s many signs.

When I met Beresford to discuss Mao’s Last Dancer, I found him to be a very decent fellow with a calming presence. One can immediately understand why he is a director, as it is a profession that demands a cool head, a person who can calmly operate under extreme pressure. Indeed, directing a film is much like being the president of a small country: You have to juggle a variety of concerns—legal, cultural, economic, social, technical. A person who does not have Beresford’s natural command of cool and calm will only bring more confusion to the already chaotic process of filmmaking. That said, my talk with Beresford was not in any way profound. All that he had to say about the making and meaning of his new film did not deepen or expand my initial impression of it. For this reason, I will not reproduce our discussion in this article.

Mao’s Last Dancer is based on the memoir by Li Cunxin, a Chinese Australian who was once a ballet dancer and is now (according to Wikipedia) a stockbroker (also on Wikipedia is the fact that Li was voted 2009 Australian Father of the Year). The movie begins where Li’s life began, in rural China. The time is the late 1960s, Mao’s Cultural Revolution is in full effect, and the Beijing Dance Academy is looking for fresh blood. They find and bring Li to the city. He is a boy, but already the dance masters can see some potential. This potential explodes into a brilliant dancer and a beautiful young man.

Soon after becoming a man, Li attracts the attention of the West. An American (Bruce Greenwood) takes him to the land of milk and honey on an exchange program. The young Chinese dancer finds himself in the middle of Houston in the middle of the 1970s. He is dazzled by American consumerism and political freedoms; he soon starts to disco dance and fuck loose white women. With good reason, he does not want to return to China, and this causes an international incident at the Houston consulate. The Chinese government kidnaps him but then relents to international pressure and returns him to the Americans. This success comes with a heavy price; he is no longer permitted to enter China and see his parents, who are stuck in a village.

The best thing about the movie, and why it’s worth watching, are the dance sequences. Unlike many films about great artists, Mao’s Last Dancer shows the artist in action, doing the thing—dancing—that makes him great. Chi Cao, who plays the adult Li, is in real life a professional dancer who, like his character, was born in China and, like his character, was trained at Beijing Dance Academy and, unlike his character, is currently principal dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The dance sequences bring together movement and cinema—the moving picture of the human body. The German critic Walter Benjamin once called cinema the art of the urban (traffic and crowds); it’s also the art of human motion.

The worst part of this film is, of course, the main reason why it probably got financing: the old story of the greatness of the individual. It always goes like this: If you want to be the best individual you can be, the place to go is America. China is for insects, for people who follow rules and not their passions. If you happen to be an individual in that limited, rigid, socialist order, you will be very, very unhappy and all of your dreams will not come true. Rice in an iron bowl is the most you’ll get out of communist China; America is the eternal kingdom of the individual. Mao’s Last Dancer not only reinforces this tired myth but ends with the dancer bringing the wonders of American freedom to the rural areas of China. This part of the movie must be ignored if one wants to enjoy the best part of it, the dancing.