Here is my first movie review (at least on this blog), “Mao’s Last Dancer.”
Let me give you a disclaimer: I am partial to books. I always like the book versions better, and have yet to have a movie that was made from a book prove me wrong. “The Notebook” came the closest, but I still liked the book better. Also, almost every good movie out there came from a book first! Go and do some research, and you will find this is true.
Now, I have not read this book yet, but as soon as I saw it was made from a book, I put the book on my Amazon wishlist.
“Mao’s Last Dancer” is about a Chinese boy named Li Cunxin, and is adapted from his autobiography of the same name. Li is taken from his familial village in China to Bejing where he undergoes seven grueling years of dance school. He is chosen to attend a summer school in Houston, Texas, with the Houston Ballet Company.
Upon his arrival, he meets a fellow dancer named Liz and falls in love with her, learning English and American culture along the way.
When his three months are up, Li decides he wants to stay in America, and the easiest way to do this is to marry Liz, which outrages the director of the dance company and the Chinese consulate.
Li ends up getting a divorce from Liz, but stays in Houston, where he eventually marries another fellow dancer named Mary. Li and Mary now live in Australia with their two children.
However, these details do not satisfy the immense struggle Li had to go through to stay in America. By choosing to stay, he gave up his right to ever return to China and see his family again.
Also remember that this is in the early 1980s, and Communist China can be a scary place where anyone who does the slightest thing that can be perceived as anti-Communist can be jailed and never seen again.
Li had persistent nightmares that his parents were being killed because of his actions, and it only made matters worse that he could not see them or even contact him.
One can easily empathize with Li because he only wants what the rest of us want: freedom to be who he wants to be, do what he loves to do, and love who he wants to love.
“Mao’s Last Dancer” is a wonderfully done film that begins with Li stepping off the plane in Houston and flashes back and forth between his life in America and his childhood growing up in China.
I found that I liked the flashbacks to China better because they gave a sense of the culture that Li grew up in and that Americans don’t know much about, and for those of you who know me, you know that I am a big fan of anything cultural that lends further understanding between different cultures. Understanding leads to appreciation, and even though the majority of us probably cannot relate to Communism, we can certainly understand and possibly even appreciate why the people of China accepted Communism so readily, and that is what this film portrays.
Hopefully I will be able to read the book soon to do a comparison of the film and the book. [Am I sensing a possible trend for my posts?…Quite possibly 😉 ]