True story loses something in cinematic translation
When professional ballet dancer Chi Cao dances as Li Cunxin in Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer the film is mesmerizing. Beresford expertly demonstrates the sheer physicality of Cao’s movements using the camera to show the impressive leaps Cao achieves with ease the difficult-to-comprehend extension of his limbs and the graceful fluidity of his every movement. As a document of the jaw-dropping athleticism required of a world-class dancer the film is a triumph. Unfortunately Dancer stumbles to the floor when it comes to most everything else.
That Beresford can’t nail down his story is strange given that the film is based on the autobiography of Li a Chinese dancer who fought to stay in the U.S. during the 1980s. The film follows Li from being hand-picked by Chairman Mao’s communist government for special ballet training as a child to an international standoff after he refuses to return from a summer exchange in Houston but struggles to effectively communicate this true story’s basic elements.
For one Jan Sardi’s script is frustratingly vague regarding many of the pivotal moments of Li’s life. We see a young Li selected from his village school but are never given any reason why he stood out. We see he’s far from a star pupil at his specialized academy and is often the brunt of verbal abuse from one of his instructors but are given no explanation why he is continuously thrust into the spotlight. Li even expresses a dislike for ballet in one scene only to be overcome by an all-consuming urge later for no evident reason.
In these instances the film comes across as lazy. It’s as if Beresford uses the fact that Li becomes a wildly successful dancer as a shortcut around developing how he got there. Because we know that Li will leave China and becomes a star Beresford is content to skim through the backstory showing Li’s past in elliptical conversations and hackneyed training montages which makes much of the middle portion of Dancer unnecessary.
Adding to the film’s troubles is a pile of underdeveloped characters that seemingly only exist when in Li’s immediate proximity. There are some nice comic moments between Li and Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) Li’s boarder and the director of the Houston Ballet but most other characters are only given broad enough definition to advance the plot when necessary another bizarre touch considering the real-life nature of the story.
Unsurprisingly the majority of the cast turns in uninspired perfunctory performances in their narrow roles. It’s again only Cao and Greenwood who manage to make their characters appear as anything more than breathing plot mechanisms. Cao is particularly impressive in Li’s fish-out-of-water moments his halting English and wide-eyed befuddlement amplifying the vast differences between his stark Chinese upbringing and the U.S. at the beginning of the “Me Decade.”
Those ballet scenes save Mao’s Last Dancer from its general undercooked quality though. The choreography camera work and Cao’s movements combine to create some truly striking images that will leave even ballet neophytes — such as this writer — slack-jawed in awe. Seeing them just requires slogging through an otherwise bland film.
