Dada’s Dance

Zhang Yuan, once a leader of the Chinese sixth generation with Beijing Bastards, here provides a sultry and dynamic portrait of the quest of a girl (the stunning Li Xinyun) for her biological mother. The young, idiosyncratic Dada is not happy with her mother’s new friend. He lives with them and what initially seems to be a temporary arrangement starts to acquire more permanent forms. When Dada talks to the man about this, he tells her that her mother is not her real mother. Upset and confused, Dada runs away, with the infatuated boy next door in her wake. Searching for the biological mother of an adolescent yearning for her own identity, the two increasingly have to look after each other. The journey becomes a series of attraction and rejection in which Dada does not have the time and patience for the emotions of her young admirer. When their odyssey turns out to be without success after a few humiliating encounters, she wants to go home again. The question is what she’ll find there.
Dada’s Dance is the crazy story of an obstreperous young woman, but the director also portrays her through the eyes of the boy next door as a desirable, sensual promise, as a result of which the film has a surprising tenderness. Guerra’s music also gives her rite de passage a melancholy undertone with the prospect of unavoidable adulthood. (GT)