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Movies & TV

Mao’s Last Dancer

MAO’S LAST DANCER (Mongrel, 2009) D: Bruce Beresford, w/ Chi Cao, Bruce Greenwood. Rating: NN DVD package: none Rating: NN


The final ballet is spectacular, and Chi Cao demonstrates wonderful leaps throughout, but Mao’s Last Dancer is overall a bland, detached biopic with a strong narrative but no insight.

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As a young boy in the 1970s, Li Cunxin is taken from his peasant family by the Chinese government to live and train in the state-run ballet academy. A decade later, he’s allowed to study in the U.S. with the Houston Ballet, which leads to onstage success and a determination to stay in America when his government orders him home. Conflict ensues.

The implications of a state-run upbringing emerge when the Houston Ballet’s artistic director comments on the lack of emotion in the Chinese students’ dancing. Chi, who plays Li as an adult, is a good enough actor to deliver strong emotion when he needs to, but the script never goes very deep into Li’s emotional life. Nor does it do much with the rigours of ballet training or the effects of the differences between Chinese and Western approaches to dance. These things are all present, but only as passing elements.

A commentary or making-of doc might have clarified director Bruce Beresford’s intentions, but the disc has no extras.

EXTRAS Widescreen. English, French audio and subtitles.

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