Dance and the Party, China Style

Because something really happened doesn’t mean it’s not a hopelessly corny cliché. And just because something’s a hopelessly corny cliché doesn’t mean it’s not affecting.  

   “Mao’s Last Dancer,â€� about Li Cunxin (played by Chi Cao as the adult) who was plucked from a poor village in China to become a top ballet star, is all of these: true, completely hokey and a tear-jerker that earns its tears.

   Directed by Bruce Beresford (“Driving Miss Daisy,â€� “Tender Merciesâ€�) and based on Li’s autobiography, the film flips back and forth between 1980s Texas, where Li arrives as a wide-eyed innocent on an exchange program, and his rural village in the mid 1960s, where he barely subsisted with his six brothers.

   Communist Party functionaries arrive in the school to find promising children for the Beijing Ballet Academy.

  He is whisked away from his proud mother (the eternally lovely Joan Chen) and father to the hard and very doctrinaire academy, where party rhetoric is taught even more strenuously than ballet.

   The film hits all the expected notes: the beauty and poverty of life in Li’s village; his culture shock upon arriving in America — having been singled out by ballet director Ben Stevenson on a visit to China; his journey of discovery as he encounters the pleasures of freedom: disco dancing, money, muffins, girls.

   But despite these familiar scenes, the specificity of Li’s particular experience — the physical landscape of China and the political and cultural environment that created his situation — is interestingly drawn.

  And as a dance film, it gives more time to the dancing than it strictly had to, and while the choreography is mostly garish, the dancing is superb and filmed with a fresh eye, without distracting quick cuts or close ups on body parts. The scenes in the ballet academy give a real feel for the hard work and commitment that is required to reach the highest heights — a scene in which Li practices split jumps over and over is almost physically painful to watch.

   Beresford has a way with actors, and he’s got a good crew here, particularly Bruce Greenwood, who is gentle and lilting as Ben Stevenson, and Kyle MacLachlan, playing Charles Foster, the lawyer called in for what is supposed to be the dramatic high point of the movie. Li has decided not to return to China — he’s fallen in love with his first American girlfriend, Elizabeth, and doesn’t want to go back, so he marries her.  The Chinese consulate takes him hostage, and Foster, with a media frenzy building behind him, negotiates an end to the standoff. These scenes fall flat, though — Li’s release seems anticlimactic — and later scenes of marital tension between Li and Elizabeth are, well,  just laughably bad.

   Never mind.

   She leaves, he goes on to great stardom, and it’s not really a spoiler to say that when, at long last, he is reunited with his beloved parents, tears fall all around.

   “Mao’s Last Dancerâ€� is rated PG for brief violence, some sensuality, language and smoking. It will be appearing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, shortly.