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'Up the Yangtze' personalizes cost of progress

Rob Thomas  —  9/05/2008 10:17 am

I suppose if they rerouted the Mississippi River and displaced millions of Midwesterners, we'd make a few movies about it, too. On the heels of "Manufactured Landscapes" and "Still Life" comes "Up the Yangtze," yet another film about the aftershocks of China's Three Gorges Dam project.

The massive dam is the largest hydroelectric project in the world, and a symbol of China's status as a global economic power. But some paid a steep price for that prowess; over a million residents were displaced, and numerous villages and ancient cultural sites found themselves submerged at the bottom of the river, lost forever. As a metaphor for the effects of globalization on a country's traditions, you can't get much more stunning than that.

While the documentary "Manufactured Landscapes" lingered on the terrible visual poetry of the dam project, and Jia Zhang-ke's drama "Still Life" found pathos and even wry humor in the displacement, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang's "Up the Yangtze" is a straightforward documentary about the project's aftereffects on individuals.

Teenage Yu Shui lives on the banks of the Yangtze with her poor family, who are busy dismantling their shack in advance of the rising waters. The project brings opportunity, of a sort; Yu gets a job washing dishes on a luxury cruise ship that takes Western tourists up and down the river, where they can see the villages and shrines before they are lost forever. Again, the metaphor is striking, as Yu's new job evokes an entire economy's shift from manufacturing and farming to a giant service industry.

The elderly tourists don't strike me as bad sorts, just cocooned in their comfortable lives, although it does seem a little odd to choose another culture's demise as your vacation getaway. There's one funny moment where the ship employees are instructed on how to deal with the tourists, and what topics to avoid ("Don't compare Canada to the United States.")

While Yu quietly suffers in her menial job, we meet a young bartender named Chen Bo Yu, (who introduces himself as "Jerry" to the passengers) who sees nothing but economic opportunity in China's new economy, and easily ingratiates himself with the passengers. Although it's clear the film's sentiments lie more with Yu, you can see that there is an upside for those like Jerry who are willing to be ambitious, forward-thinking, and unsentimental about the country's past.

The tension between these two philosophies is played out against some gorgeous visuals in the film, of the lights from the cruise ship and neighboring cities reflecting on this great, inexorable river. "Up the Yangtze" adroitly operates on several levels of scale, allowing us to bear witness to the awesome tragedy that this region of China is bearing, and also seeing how that massive change affects one ordinary person.

Rob Thomas  —  9/05/2008 10:17 am