'Blind Mountain'
CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS
Also: 'Four Minutes,' 'Dare Not Walk Alone,' 'Jack and Jill vs. the World,' 'Constantine's Sword,' 'Deal'
Writer-director Li Yang's relentlessly jolting "Blind Mountain" is his response to the consequences of worshiping money in a society in which rapid economic development threatens to destroy traditional values and ethics. Shockingly revelatory rather than didactic, this boldly confident film calls attention to how hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted and sold off every year in China.
An attractive recent college graduate (Huang Lu) can't find a job and is therefore only too grateful to take a well-paying position to go to a remote mountain region to buy medicinal herbs for resale. She ends up sold off to a brutal farmer (Yang Youan). His family and community, which includes other kidnapped "brides," are apathetic to her plight. This is an ignorant, primitive world of intense machismo in which women indeed are chattel, and life is made worse at every turn by an epidemic of money-grubbing that snuffs out even the smallest acts of kindness between people. This is a resolutely tough-minded, beautifully crafted film so compelling as to make bearable watching the nearly unbearable.
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Kevin Thomas
"Blind Mountain." Unrated. Sexual violence and pervasive brutality. In Mandarin, Shaanxi dialect, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. At the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.
Too little a lesson in 'Four Minutes'
Though crafted with obvious skill and vision by writer-director Chris Kraus, the German import "Four Minutes" is so relentlessly oppressive it suffocates its potentially strong themes and characterizations. It might also be the most unsatisfying, unsentimental, least cathartic teacher-student drama ever made. Call it the anti-"Madame Sousatzka."
The curdled octogenarian Traude Krüger (the committed Monica Bleibtreu), a piano teacher at the same women's prison since World War II, takes on her most challenging pupil in the form of Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung), a former child music prodigy convicted of murder.
It's the ultimate odd coupling as über-rigid Frau Krüger imposes her unpleasant brand of discipline on the feral young Jenny, driving her to perfect the classics to win an upcoming piano competition. Prison politics provide additional motivations but tend to clutter the story.
