His Mao badge pinned to his lapel, Li Cunxin awkwardly passes the portrait of Ronald Reagan at Houston airport. A promising young dancer, Li has been sent in the summer of 1981 as an intern with the Houston Ballet. China's Communist-led capitalist revolution had barely begun: he stares with widening eyes at all the tall buildings and is amazed to be given a bedroom of his own. Li never saw a muffin before—or an ATM. He's truly a stranger in a strange land.
Based on Li's autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer is a fish out of water story, a love story and a memoir of life in the straightjacket of Maoism. Directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), Mao's Last Dancer shifts in time and space between '70s China and '80s America—between subsistence and affluence, totalitarianism and democracy. Plucked seemingly at random from a one-room provincial school and sent to Beijing's prestigious Academy of Arts, Li encounters Mao's tyrannical wife, Jiang Quing, as she purges the dance department of its classical Russian influences in favor of rifle-wielding, red-flag-waving “proletarian” acrobatics. The fetters were already loosening by the time Li arrived in the U.S., but China's consul in Houston advises him: “Don't trust anyone. Let your Communist principles guide you.”
Yes, the contrast between China and America was dramatic, and the screenplay does not exaggerate the deadly rhetoric of the Maoist regime during the “Cultural Revolution.” Chi Cao plays Li; as a dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet and graduate (at a later date) from the Beijing Academy, Chi probably has some feel for the person he portrays. While there is something a little sugared and Hollywood about Mao's Last Dancer, it conveys a sense for the time and place and dramatizes it effectively for general audiences. The dance scenes are well mounted.
Mao's Last Dancer is out on Blu-ray and DVD.
