Search - Welcome to Destination Shanghai on DVD

Cutting edge feature from China

G. Anthony Hecht Jr. | Washington, DC USA | 05/20/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As in his ground-breaking Shanghai Panic, Andrew Cheng here starts from the perception that Shanghai has lost whatever social and moral restraints it ever chafed under. This time he focuses on older (but not necessarily more mature) characters and uses a more conventional one-thing-leads-to-another structure to explore their variously damaged lives. First there's the cocky young man who fancies his chances as a gigolo but quickly learns what it means to work as a whore. Then there's the faded would-be diva who presents for a local cable channel and earns extra money on the side by `restoring' the odd hymen. Next there's her estranged husband, the gay man who married her to help her get back to the city after the Cultural Revolution but left her as soon as she'd borne their son. And finally there's the boy himself, the withdrawn, disturbed son of this marriage of convenience. Cheng smartly divides the film between documentary-style scenes and stylised, theatrical tableaux, linking the two with digitally manipulated images of the city. The ensemble, which shades from black comedy into a delicate melancholy, adds up to a persuasive anatomy of China's new emotional and sexual economy. Screened in competition at the 2003 Rotterdam Film Festival, where it was awarded the Fipresci Prize."