Blind Mountain (Yang Li, 2007): China

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Blind Mountain, the second feature from Chinese writer-director Yang Li, is a film which starts with everything in its favour. It has a compelling, distressing real-life inspiration in the plight of women kidnapped and sold off as brides to meet the demands of a male-biased population created by the one-child policy. It has actual rescued brides amongst its cast, adding authenticity to an already talented cast. It has spectacular mountain vistas from the Chinese countryside in which to spin its tale. It even has the established conventions of a good escape drama to draw upon. Yet with all of this potential it sadly, ultimately fails.The film opens with the naive Bai (the excellent Lu Huang) heading out into rural China in pursuit of an elusive job with which to pay back her parents for her education. Left at a remote farm whilst her co-workers search for medicinal plants in the mountains, she drinks a glass of water and falls asleep. When she awakes from this surprising slumber she finds her ‘friends’ have gone and that her freedom has vanished along with them. She has been illegally sold to a farming family to be the bride of their son. Trapped by bars, chains and the complicity or indifference of the villagers she struggles against her plight in the face of violence.

In spite of this premise, the film struggled to capture my attention. The problems begin with the dialogue. Although much subtlety can be lost in translation to subtitles, Blind Mountain is hamstrung by the clumsy, forced and cliched lines that the characters are lumbered with. I am always more lenient on translated films than those which I can watch in their native tongue, but I’m not this forgiving. The multiple escape attempts blur together (each is simply a variation on the one before) until you really wish Bai would give up or use her education and implied intellect to try something different! Bai’s repeated beatings are strangely shot in a fashion which gives them the air of a nothing more serious than a schoolyard scuffle. This is confusing not only due to the fact that they render her unconscious, but also because an earlier rape scene is so powerful, particularly so as it shows the complicity of another female. Equally annoying is the Paul Haggis-esque determination of Yang Li to hammer home his point through unnecessary repetition and constant reminders to the audience of the stakes involved. Threaten violence. Show a limping woman. Bring on a corrupt official. Rinse, repeat and throw in a dead baby girl to make sure that the audience understands how we have got to this point. This is the second film I’ve seen at the festival which didn’t trust its audience and it pays as heavy a price for it.

I want to like this film. It addresses worthy social and political issues. It has the deliberate pacing that I admire in other director’s works. It is beautiful to behold. I deeply admire the director’s tenacity in bringing his vision to the screen despite enforced cuts to the film in his homeland. But in the end he and it do the worst thing that any film can – they bore me.