Dancer Li Cunxin has a naturally compelling story. And though veteran Australian director Bruce Beresford ("Breaker Morant" and "Driving Miss Daisy") does his best to tug at the heartstrings through some clichéd and manipulative storytelling, the basics of Li's journey from rural China to the international ballet stage still reward.
Cutting back and forth between past and present in a predictable pattern, "Mao's Last Dancer" (based on Li's 2003 autobiography) tells a kind of struggling artist story that's something of a remnant of politically different decades past.
In 1972, Li, an 11-year-old Chinese peasant child with preternatural flexibility, is plucked from his mud shack of a one-room provincial school by officials from Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy. Bundled off to the big city, Li is molded, through tough training, to be a classical ballet dancer - and a model young communist, too. Training for the budding dancers was as much political indoctrination as anything. Classic ballets such as "Swan Lake" were declared politically dangerous.
Jeté ahead to 1979 and as the Cultural Revolution began to thaw, the now adult Li (played by real-life ballet dancer Chi Cao of the Birmingham Royal Ballet) was plucked to participate in a then-unique cultural exchange program and dispatched to join Houston Ballet for a summer.
Scenes of Li's arrival in the brash commercialism of the Lone Star State - and his overwhelming cultural shock - again sport a kind of predictability, though Texas audiences will probably be amused.
Of course, once Li has experienced good old American creative liberty - not to mention its personal and economic advantages - he doesn't want to return to China. But the Chinese government doesn't want to let him go. The subsequent stand-off in the embassy and attempted kidnapping of Li set off a media and diplomatic storm that only the intervention of future president George H.W. Bush resolves. (And yes, that part of the story is true.)
Though the film's dance sequences are plenty and lengthy, Beresford unfortunately opts to draw out Li's jumps in slow motion. It's unnecessary because Chi is a strong and lyric dancer in his own right. It's also a pedestrian approach to filming ballet.
By far the story's most intriguing character is Houston Ballet director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), the impresario behind Li's coming to Houston in the first place. (Stevenson's 27-year reign at the Houston company, which ended in 2003, catapulted the regional ballet into one of the nation's foremost.) But we see little of the complexity of Stevenson's character, even though it's largely his often calculated ambition - as well as his connections to Houston power players - that sets so much of the story in action.
Still, for arts enthusiasts, Li's story is not one to overlook even if its cinematic telling bears few original touches.
"Mao's Last Dancer"
Our grade: B-
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 117 min
MPAA rating: PG
Release Date: Oct. 1, 2009
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