Electric Shadows

Can you imagine a Chinese Cinema Paradiso? Xiao Jiang can, and her highly entertaining début feature gives us a pretty vivid impression of what it might be like. Her storyline – divided between Beijing now and Ningxia thirty years ago – is about what it takes to heal grievous emotional wounds within a family. But all of her central characters are movie fans, and the key events in their lives are inextricably linked to the movies they saw and loved. Unless you grew up in China, you may not know the movies in question, but you’ll recognize the syndrome. And when you see the clips, you’ll understand immediately. Electric Shadows opens in present-day Beijing with a disastrous encounter between delivery boy Dabing (Xia Yu, who won the Best Actor prize in Venice for In the Heat of the Sun) and Ling Ling (Qi Zhongyang). Dabing is the one with a bump on his head, but Ling Ling’s the one who ends up in hospital, receiving overdue treatment for a life that has left her dazed, confused and hurt. He visits her home to keep her fish fed and starts reading her diary. It tells a story that shocks him in ways he could never have expected, but it also reminds him of his own childhood passion for the movies. Those were the days before television, when movies were the only real mass medium and when audiences breathed and dreamed as one. (TR)