Beijing Bicycle

In the opening credits of Beijing Bicycle, a sprawling, intensely beautiful urban drama from Wang Xiaoshuai, the camera is close to the ground but still looking down at the harsh light bouncing off the pavement. Silhouettes of pedals and wheels gliding in front of the lens, the effect suggests elaborate paper cutouts gliding through a projector beam. We are in Beijing, an emerging megalopolis where cars are too expensive to be ubiquitous?a place where you must ride to survive. China is a repressive Communist country taking baby steps toward capitalism and democracy, and the film notes the intense social, political and economic changes that have taken place in the past 20 years. But Beijing Bicycle isn't agitprop that plays like a cinematic term paper (an all-too-common vibe that makes some Chinese movies travel poorly). It's a modern neorealist film with obvious echoes of The Bicycle Thief, only cooler, grittier and in some ways more mysterious.

The film has two protagonists, both dependent on bikes. The first is Guei (Cui Lin), a naive country kid who moves to Beijing and takes a job as a bike messenger. The second is Jian (Li Bin), a middle-class, upward-striving college kid who needs a bike to impress a cyclist-crazy girl and fit in with his better-off friends, but can't convince his father (Zhao Yiwel) to keep a long-ago promise to buy him one. Going into the film, I didn't know how these two characters would be connected; the device that links them is just clever enough that I'd like to preserve it for viewers who, like me, prefer their surprises unspoiled. If you're one of those people, you'd best skip the next two paragraphs.

Guei has to deliver messages and parcels for three days, then the bike is his. But shortly before he's about to earn the bike, he spends too long on a botched delivery to a businessman at a health spa (the employees mistakenly think he's there for a shower), and when he gets outside, the bike has been stolen. (The long, long shot of Guei walking up and down the front entrance of the spa, looking for his long-gone bike, is so mortifyingly sad that it crosses every conceivable cultural line; everyone's had a day where it seems like things can't get any worse, then they do.) The stolen bike finds its way to a flea market where it's purchased by Jian, who rides it flamboyantly around the neighborhood during the day (to him and his running buddies, bicycles are big, whirring dicks they can do tricks with), then hides it away at night so his dad won't find it. Soon enough, the men's lives will intersect, and each will assert his claim to the bike.

While my sympathies lie more with Guei (a personal thing: given the choice of two protagonists who seem equally decent, I tend to root for the one with less money), the filmmaker doesn't encourage us to root for one over the other, even though Jian's friends are preppie troublemakers forever on the prowl for a fight. A wrenching beatdown sequence late in the film poses a seated, brutalized Guei in front of a distant neon crescent that arcs over his head like a halo, but the image doesn't suggest an attitude toward Guei in general; it merely elaborates on his suffering in that one scene. Both young men have good reason to claim sole ownership. But their predicament, while comic and sad, is nobody's fault. If Beijing Bicycle has a universal message, it's that other people's problems invariably become your problem, and that it's better to grit your teeth and work out a solution than waste time and energy assigning blame.

Viewers who associate Wang mainly with his debut film, the stark, Jim Jarmusch-like black-and-white comedy-drama The Days, or his noir-inflected dockside love triangle So Close to Paradise, will be startled by the style of Beijing Bicycle. Here, Wang works with long takes and natural sound, keeping the camera at medium distance whenever he can?even when his characters are running from their enemies or getting beaten in the street. A number of comic and tragic accidents receive deft, suspenseful buildup, but the incidents themselves occur off-camera. Sometimes Wang moves in close during violent scenes, but the brutality is often hidden behind a wall or door, or partly obscured by foreground objects; we only sense the full effects of the violence by looking at the unnerved, curious faces of onlookers, or by viewing the damage done to the characters' faces and bodies afterward.

Wang makes his political and social points subtly, too. In the early sequence where Guei trains for his bike messenger job, the ritualized conformity of the place is communicated by images of identical bikes in rows, the hands of offscreen messengers grabbing identical packs and, finally, the messengers lining up for inspection in their identical uniforms. The object of Guei's affection, a beautiful woman who lives in a rich family's house, is identified with her expensive red pumps, which wordlessly express her desire for money, respectability and style.

All in all, the film is more naturalistic, less studied than the director's previous work?a controlled, intelligent, occasionally startling movie, but never "stylish" in that Wong Kar-Wai/Paul Thomas Anderson, film-schoolish way. I've heard complaints that Beijing Bicycle is a shade long and that its decision to jump between two central protagonists makes it lose focus sometimes, and I suppose these gripes have some merit. But Wang's choices create so many heightened, lifelike moments that the pitfalls seem a small price to pay. Scene for scene, this is a fine, rich movie?hard as asphalt, and as arresting as the sound of a bike's bell ringing.

Framed

Fish story: Maelstrom is a French-Canadian existential pop parable about a businesswoman-cum-model named Bibi Champagne (Marie-Josee Croze) whose life falls apart after she has an abortion, then drunkenly kills a fishmonger with her car, flees the scene and tries to forget about it. If that doesn't remove your sympathy for a heroine, I'm not sure what will. But it wasn't the plot that turned me off; it was writer-director Denis Villeneuve's needlessly slick, MTV-style direction, and his disinterest in exploring the casual amorality of the heroine's urban world, in which random strangers on the subway warn her to forget about the accident, it was just bad luck, etc. (The tone suggests not a critique, but a caricatured rendering of how things really are. I didn't buy it because I'm optimistic enough to think average folks are better than that; but I suspect people who work in the entertainment industry will think Villeneuve is too much the optimist.)

Karmically, things work out all right for Bibi; ridiculous plot convolutions and vaguely satiric images (the narrator is a dead fish on a chopping block) leaven the story's moral ugliness and attempt to send you home with a smile on your face. If you're 16 and muddling through an intro to creative writing class, you could write a dandy paper about the film's use of nautical symbolism (fish = fertility; dead fish = fertility thwarted). Grownups should skip it.