Reviews

Up the Yangtze

The new Chinese Dream

By GERALD PEARY | June 4, 2008

3.5 Stars

Up the Yangtze

This telling, absorbing documentary takes Yung Chang, a talented Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, on a melancholy trip to the country of his grandparents, where the Three Gorges Dam project is forcibly relocating two million mostly embittered Chinese citizens living along the Yangtze River. Chang sets his camera on a luxury cruise liner sailing up and down the Yangtze. The clientele are Western tourists, so the Chinese employees on the boat are given Anglicized names. We follow “Cindy,” a shy, homesick Chinese peasant girl assigned to lowly dishwashing duties, and “Jerry,” a handsome, partying narcissist who carries the bags of American visitors so he can hustle for greenback tips. Their stories become a microcosm of the country’s new generation and its new Chinese Dream — which is as much a cheat and deception as the American one. Mandarin + English | 93 minutes | MFA: June 6-8 + 12-15

Topics: Reviews , Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Movies, More

| More

view all

[ 06/02 ] Always, Patsy Cline @ Ogunquit Playhouse

ARTICLES BY GERALD PEARY

REVIEW: ELENA | May 30, 2012
Andrei Zvyagintsev's film, a Special Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2011, becomes more than a domestic melodrama: a grim, effective allegory of the daily whirl in Putinland.

REVIEW: I WISH | May 22, 2012
Two elementary school brothers living in southern Japan are forced to live in different cities due to the estrangement of their parents.

REVIEW: SURVIVING PROGRESS | May 15, 2012
Despite prestigious talking heads like Margaret Atwood, Jane Goodall, and Stephen Hawking, there is nothing new here beyond what every conscientious liberal already knows is wrong with the world.

REVIEW: HEADHUNTERS | May 08, 2012
Roger (Aksel Hennie) is an Oslo yuppie with a gorgeous, blonde wife, a top-drawer job as a corporate headhunter, and a lucrative side employment stealing fancy paintings.

REVIEW: ELLES | May 08, 2012
How did the Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska dupe the classy Juliette Binoche to participate in such a dubious, exploitative film?