GREAT WALL STREET
A visit last week to my local Chinese DVD vendor (a side trip from dropping off tax forms for my preparer) yielded a couple of interesting, non-wuxia/kung fu films.  First, another quasi-propaganda piece, Confucius, with Chow Yun-Fat as the sage, who actually winds up at one point having a heart-to-heart chat with Lao Tzu.  It was a pretty movie, but left me feeling like I'd watched a Chinese version of "The Greatest Story Ever Told," with CYF in the Max Von Sydow role.

I also revisited an old video tape of Bertolucci's "Last Emperor" while I made soup from the remains of my usual solo Friday night Costco huli huli chicken.  When the Wizard's away, I cook as I may...and that usually means several meals from one pre-cooked chicken.  I'd forgotten that that was a pretty good movie, even if a lot of it is made up.  I'm thinking maybe I need to read Twilight in the Forbidden City which was used (in the film at least, along with some issues of Time Magazine, eternal source of history and truth) as evidence against Pu Yi by the re-educating Communists.

Then I put Empire of Silver, the other recent item my video vendor insisted I watch, in the laptop. Despite opening with some fabulous scenes of camel caravans in the desert, evoking Dragon Inn or Seven Swords,  it turned out to have no elements of kung fu or wuxia...but a choppy plot about filial piety (there's that Confucius thing) and...banking. I didn't know that Shanxi province was the center of banking in the Qing Dynasty. Great Wall Street. A lot of guys with queues hauling around taels of silver in the late Qing and early Republic, fighting off warlords and cleaning up after incompetent bank managers.  (Well, there was one swordfight, but a gun put an end to it.) This was strangely au courant.

And there was a romantic element that could have sustained at least 24 episodes of HK TVB: the number three son (Aaron Kwok, can't hold a candle to Vincent Zhao in the desert, or even Pierce Brosnan in Noble House), is a lazy playboy who had a serious coming-of-age affair with the woman who later becomes his father's second wife. Still, the playboy bounces back to save the banking dynasty (while fighting off wolves in the Gobi and praying for advice in the ancestral hall). Tragically, his romantic interest goes off to Mei Guo with a lady missionary (who helped her get a prophylactic hysterectomy and fake her funeral), oddly, inexplicably, played by Jennifer Tilley, not so sexy really, in a cameo role.

This film, by a Taiwanese director and produced by interests in China and Hong Kong, was featured in the 2009 Shanghai Film Festival.  I think the Great Wall Street of China has moved south from Shanxi.