THE BLUE KITE Movie Review

Lan Feng Zheng

Many of history's most significant epochs—those that cause upheaval in the lives of millions—tend to be treated on screen in ways that try to demonstrate the “big picture” results of this change, but at a cost of de-emphasizing the day-to-day human experience of living through such an era. Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite achieves its considerable power by taking exactly the opposite road—by giving us one family's daily struggles in Beijing between the years 1953 and 1967. In film after film set during the Cultural Revolution, we've seen individuals accused of crimes and reaction told to “go home and engage in some constructive self-criticism.” In The Blue Kite, the protagonist is a child whose father is taken away for “reeducation,” and whose world and family structure will never be the same after. This child—played by three different actors during the film's 14 year span—attempts to come to terms with the changes taking place both inside his home and in the streets of China, but he's able in the end to draw no easy conclusions about the course that his family's lives have taken. As with a great many recent Chinese films, The Blue Kite is exquisitely designed and structured. It also, like so many other superb Chinese films, has been banned and suppressed at home. Perhaps it's time for the regime that bans such eloquent, humane and—dare I say it?—“non-reactionary” works of art as The Blue Kite, Zhang Yimou's To Live, and Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine to engage in just a bit of constructive self-criticism itself.

NEXT STOP … To Live, Farewell My Concubine, The Gate of Heavenly Peace

1993 138m/C CH Lu Liping, Zhang Wenyao, Pu Quanxin; D: Tian Zhuangzhuang; W: Xiao Mao; C: Yong Hou; M: Yoshihide Otomo. Nominations: Independent Spirit Awards ‘95: Best Foreign Film. VHS KIV