Up the Yangtze

I finally watched this film during its third run at a local art-house cinema, having missed it on two previous occasions. I enjoyed the film, but at the same time felt it could have been done better. The knitting could have been tighter.

Ten years ago I took a boat trip up the Yangtze, starting from ChongQing. No, I was not on a 5-star cruiser depicted in this film. My boat was much more modest, and smaller. At night I could hear rats racing across the ceiling. But it was, nevertheless, an enjoyable trip. The water level was much lower at that time, so the cliff faces were higher and more impressive. What I once saw is now mostly submerged, as was chronicled in this film. Taking this trip 'Up the Yangtze' again on the big screen sure brought back fond memories.

Overall I find the focus on the demise of a poor family affected by the rising water level, and the activities surrounding large cruise ships catering to well-off visitors from around the world to be a good and relevant backdrop to this informative documentary. The acting and interviews were well conducted, with unforced ease and human sentiment. At the end, you draw your own conclusion who to sympathize with, whether you want to point fingers at the establishment, or just resign to the fact that progress toward modernization, in any country, comes with a price.

As the end credits rolled on the screen, a band played 'To traverse a big sea you need a good navigator', a song composed and forced into the ears of every Chinese national during the Culteral Revolution - in praise of Mao, the 'Navigator'. It was a great propaganda song but the band, using inappropriate instruments, made a mess of it and it sounded like white noise. I don't know why the director did not chose the far more superior 'choir' version, which would have been more becoming to close out a good documentary. This is just one example of how some fine-tuning and refinements could have brought this film one step closer to being a masterpiece.

The biggest fear with documentaries is that they got bogged down in the boring details that don't do enough to tell a story. This film, however, is always intriguing because although it tackles a large issue, the impact the flooding of the Yangtze river valley that displaced millions of residents, it does it through the very human story of one family. There are some nice panoramic shots, and interlaced among the genuinely touching moments was a wry humour. It's a great film for those who want to see a portrait of the lives of contemporary Chinese in transition, and for those who want to see the aspirations of China, and the challenges that it faces.

For such a slow paced documentary, you might at first doubt it's ability to draw you in. Initially, I watched the film because I somehow expected it to be one man's journey into the depths of China. But, no, it's not really about that. Instead of diving into China as a geographical ___location, "Up the Yangtze" concerns itself with the culture and politics of modern China as it affects the average citizen.

Two characters are central to this documentary's narrative. 'Cindy' who lives with her family in a shack beside the rapidly rising river, and 'Jerry' who comes from a higher standard of life in the city. They both find themselves working on a cruise ship which goes up and down the Yangtze river. The passages which deal directly with the ship and ship's passengers are rather revealing. The tourists come off largely as self-absorbed and unimaginative people with far too much money. They seem to all share peculiarly uninterested attitudes. This comes in rather stark contrast to the locals' acute awareness of their situation.

There are several interviews throughout the course of the film that reveal a darker side than might first be visible. This is particularly poignant during an interview carried on with a shopkeeper while a heated argument goes on outside.

Certain limitations are apparent in such a focused documentary, but it's very interesting and more than worth your attention.

RATING: 7.0 out of 10

Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang's National Film Board of Canada-sponsored documentary about the displacement of the Yangtze river and the population surrounding it by the Three Gorges Dam in China creates a vivid picture of people and transitions. But it's got a tough act to follow in the films of Jia Zhang-ke, whose recent 'Still Life' goes over similar ground in a style that feels at once more sweeping and more intimate.

Chang mainly alternates between a big "luxury cruise" boat that takes North Americans and Europeans to see the river landscape before flooding changes everything, and a poor family living in an improvised riverside shack that's shabby but is in a place where there is land they can cultivate for food. In the course of the film, the family is moved up to temporary housing where they have to buy food and water and their sixteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to continue beyond middle school, struggles and makes her way up from dishwasher to dining room help on the boat. Meanwhile Chang also follows another new boat worker called "Jerry" (Chen Bu Yu) who washes out after his trial period despite being handsome and a good singer. He is accused by his supervisor of being over-confident, egotistical, and careless of others, which some Chinese think is a common byproduct of one-child families.

'Up the Yangtze' is skillfully edited by Hannele Halm to underline social contrasts . It moves seamlessly back and forth between "Cindy" (as the subsistence farmer's daughter, Shui Yu, is called for her boat job) and her family's shack. We see "Jerry" boasting, drinking and swearing at a Karaoke bar before beginning his boat job. He interacts smoothly with a couple of young European men while bartending on the boat, and performs a Chinese song for an assembled audience of the tourists on board. The workers' supervisor, "Campbell" (Ping He) gives them lots of instructions.

Symbolically, Chang's extensive coverage of life on the cruise boat among the young workers and their supervisors, who teach them how to tell tourists what they want to hear and not bring up controversial subjects, is a vision of China's desire to make nice with the western world on its upward path to being one of the leading nations. At the same time, this cruise boat story seems somehow peripheral to general Chinese life. Jia's 'Still Life,' with its haunting fiction of several different lives disrupted by the Three Gorges project, gives a more vivid sense of the turmoil and unpredictability of contemporary China and more specific detail about the shifting interface between people and the dam's ongoing displacements. The cruise boat story in 'Up the Yangtze' has its richer counterpoint in Jia's previous film, 'The World,' and he presented a portrait of several decades of contemporary Chinese history in his second feature film, the 2000 'Platform.' In 'Unknown Pleasures' (2002), Jia dramatized the marginal lives of semi-educated young people (like Cindy) who are caught in the swirl of transformation of the rural into the urban in China's vast economic cauldron.

But Chang seems to have had excellent access to each of the worlds he chooses to focus on, and particularly to the sense of humiliation and grief some people feel in the course of things. This includes Cindy, before she leaves home; a shopkeeper who was brutally relocated; and Jerry when he begins to realize that his coworkers don't like him because he's not a team player. Chang was able to film Cindy's parents explaining why they can't send her on to further schooling, and their humble visit to the boat after she's been working there a while. Jerry seems to have characteristics that would serve him well in a western setting or a school. But though he comes from a richer family than Cindy, such opportunities are unreachable even at nineteen, and when he's banished from the river boat job, one wonders if he may end up like the young lost souls in Jia's 'Unknown Pleasures,' who face jail or worse.

In 'Still Life' it's clear that people at all levels are being churned around in China, and since English is Chang's first language, it's quite possible "Up the Yangtze" is meant to evoke the words "up the river." It seems that the only value that survives is the intense desire to work and no one can really see the big picture, even though they may supervise the construction of big bridges or buildings. The recent earthquake in China is a new demonstration that planning and construction are often faulty. Since Chang's film is a documentary, you may wonder why nobody is asked whether there wouldn't have been an alternative to the giant dam with its disruption of a vast eco-system and displacement of two million people and counting. But nobody does, and Chang's access doesn't mean he could talk to policy-makers, or even mid-level bureaucrats. Like many documentarians, he has worked very well with the material that came his way. He also refers to his own family stories and trips to the area of the river--this isn't his first. The film has a strong but not obtrusive soundtrack by Olivier Alary; the cinematography of Wang Shi Qing is often striking. Jia's 'Still Life' remains a hard act to follow.

Shown at Sundance, Seattle, San Francisco and other festivals, currently (June 2008) in US release in 6 theaters.

Perhaps I am the dam, as I was unmoved by this film. The promotional material I received prior to the showing of the film had prepared me to see a story about a huge dam project, with serious environmental and human consequences. So I was disappointed that the dam itself was not a major feature of the film, and no environmental issues were raised. But I can't really fault the film itself for the people who promote it, so I'll try to leave that aside. I was impressed with the access that the filmmakers had to get frank comments from a variety of people in the film, and for me that was something new that I enjoyed for a film from China. But still I found it to be a slow film of two kids who are sent by their families to work serving foreign tourists on a river tour boat, and the difficulties that first-time jobs, especially away from home, can bring to anyone. It was also about a very poor family having to move from their shack to a more densely-populated place where they will need to learn a different way of living. In both cases, I found that I was admiring people's ability to find ways to move forward, but I felt that the movie wanted me to believe that this was bad. Some scenes appeared to be included randomly, as they did not fit in with the rest of the film, such as the creepy stop-motion dancing kid, or the praying woman. On the flip side, the story of the two kids working on the boat seems to just stop without explanation after something significant happens to one. I wanted to know more about what happened to each of them. That it was in China, or on the Yangtze, seemed insignificant to the story itself. I don't feel that I know much more about life on the Yangtze, or the Three Gorges Dam, than before I saw the film. Seeing that a documentary of this type can be made in China, I feel this subject is therefore still ripe for someone else to make a more informative documentary about the Yangtze and/or the Dam.