(Plot Spoiler included)
'Baober' was one of several Chinese film selected for the London Film Festival. It's a shame that Chinese films now suffer from either too much funding, as in this case, or too little. On the one hand films have single-set locations and struggle to make up for the lack of a script with drawn-out shots a-la Chantal Akerman, or on the other hand are films with lavish spectacle fawning to the box-office and the tourist industry of whichever country puts up the money (see 'Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress', or 'The Emperor and the Assassin' (an assassin with bells in his hair?); similarly, 'Yiyi', an otherwise excellent Taiwanese film, with a holiday in Tokyo midway through) Even before I knew there was French money, the images of Baober's huge eyes and dewy lips reminded me of trailers I'd seen for 'Amelie' and I prepared myself with an inward groan for a cutsie romance with antecedents including the original 'BB'(or 'BeBe'), by way of 'Gigi' with a nod to 'Lolita' and all those Rohmer films with flat-chested heroines. Surprisingly, instead of a paedophiles' delight, this turned out to be revenge movie, a variation on the 'bunny boiler'. The married man who could only tolerate married life if he could at be free to ogle other women on the side, who wanted the 'high' of a sexual 'playmate' has a nasty shock when he learned the hard way that his 'child-woman' is seriously unhinged. The 'shock-by-modernisation', and the 'frightened by a cat' sequences, even the the reference to 'Carrie'-style menstruation trauma, were unconvincing explanations for Baober's condition, partly because they were so varied and disconnected. The real message is that infantilisation of women is a staple male strategy for coping with female sexuality, not female inability to cope with rapid modernisation. No wonder Chinese audiences were disappointed if they were expecting a film to celebrate Valentine's day. The female director has triumphed by subverting commercial norms, to get her real message across. It could have been lost amongst all the fancy special effects, but she seems to have succeeded, in much the same way as the Fifth Generation directors managed to subvert 'acceptable' government opinions about politics - take the money and then figure out how to make your own film in amongst the dross.
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