NOT MY MADAM BOVARY. 

Fan Bing Bing - I Am Not Madame Bovary.

At the George St. Centre, possibly only till Wednesday, we’ve got Xiaogang Feng’s  Wo
Bu Shi Pan Jinlian / I Am Not Madame Bovary. 

It occurs to me that what I know or think I know about modern China comes mainly from watching the films of  Xiaogang Feng - If You Are the One, Aftershock the first Chinese IMAX movie or Personal Tailor. He’s had his feet off the pedals lately but Madam Bovary is a serious effort. Pity about the dumb title - Emma Bovary’s predicament is totally different from that of Bing-bing Fan in the new movie, for which they struggled to find a cultural equivalent.

The normally glamorous Fan, who has been in English language multiplex movies, is a wife involved in a One Child Family apartment scam divorce, which left her without a child or a husband. Seeking redress she goes to a distant relative in the legal bureaucracy, with a gift of meat she has personally cured, and works her way up the chain of local officials (“Who cares what a peasant woman wants?”) till she decides that people in Beijing are smarter and gets the ear of a Chairman at a Party Conference.

Diligent movie viewers are saying it’s the plot of Jang Yimou’s 1992 Qiu Ju da guan si and that’s part of the point. That film’s message was that village whistle blowers just don’t get the big picture (compare other socialist country pieces like  Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Amator/ Camera Buff). Here we start hearing about looking outwards not upwards and the spread of the Internet. It’s a film about listening to the people uncannily anticipating Brexit and the Trump era. It’s argument is complicated but not difficult. Fan is barking but a real society should be able to accommodate crazy people. Even if you reject it, it’s something to be considered.

On top of that, the film making is remarkable. Feng shoots most of the action through a round matte, making for unfamiliar compositions and providing striking moments as in going though a tunnel or when the camera moves sideways, uncharacteristically following her lover-rapist who keeps on coming back into frame further undressed, or the transition to a vertical format when the action arrives in the capital, along with an ultra wide screen coda. The visuals are continually strikingly beautiful. They need to be viewed on a big screen.

What we are seeing at two hours plus may be the uncensored version. The piece has had a rough passage on it’s home turf. You may not get another crack at this one.