Dam Street (Hong yan) - Screen Daily Review

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Dam Street (Hong yan)

Lee Marshall in Venice 27 September 2005

Dir: Li Yu. Chi-Fr. 1995. 93mins. [actually 2005]

A persuasive, lyrical study of smalltown life in rural China in the 1980s and 1990s, Dam Street fully confirms the promise of director Li Yu’s debut feature, Fish And Elephant. Like that first film, Dam Street deals with women’s issues – but not in a narrow or dogmatic way. There is something of Douglas Sirk in the way Li Yu manages to combine women’s melodrama with the close study of a time and place, and the way in which a central relationship – in this case between a “fallen” woman and a 10-year-old boy who she later discovers is her son – makes up for all the small-mindedness and social hypocrisy that surrounds it.

The limpid, painterly photography, full of symbolic colour-coding, makes the film look lusher than its limited budget would suggest. Dam Street’s double-whammy festival launch at Venice and Toronto should be the prelude to more festival action and eventual arthouse distribution in selected territories.

Traditional Chinese opera singer Liu Yu makes a convincing debut here as Yun, a bright, romantic girl living in a small town in rural Sichuan province. A river running through the town – over the dam (in fact it’s more of a weir) of the title – underpins the film’s frequent recourse to water symbolism, which also branches out into piscine images: we see fish speared, hooked, scaled and gutted while still alive, and in one memorable scene, flapping all over the road, having spilled from an overturned handcart.

We are free to link the fish with the treatment meted out to Yun, another beautiful, ungraspable, abused object – but the symbolism is left for us to dip into, never imposed.

When 16-year-old Yun discovers she is pregnant, her world falls apart. She is expelled from school, publicly denounced for “moral decadence”, and told, after the birth, that her baby is dead; in fact it was given up for adoption.

A long full-screen caption fills us in on this fact, and we fast forward 10 years to the point when Yun, now a trained classical Chinese opera singer, returns to her hometown with her troupe.

Before, civic entertainment had consisted mainly of long, staged harangues by Chinese veterans of the war in Vietnam, but now even traditional opera is considered too old school: Yun is heckled and told to get her clothes off, and sing some pop songs. (There’s another nice dig at changing mores when we see Yun sticking a poster of Gong Li up in her dressing room).

Mischievous 10-year old Yong sneaks into a performance and, infatuated, is soon visiting Yun in her dressing room. The relationship between the two develops as Yun discovers the joys of hanging out with a kid who makes no demands on her, and allows her to resume her interrupted girlhood. Yong is also the only one to defend her when the wife and family of a man she’s having an affair with attack her in public.

The fact that Yong is really her son is signalled for the audience right from the start; but Yun only cottons onto this slowly, and rather than generating a pat happy ending, the realisation gives rise to a melancholy finale which is nevertheless finely-judged in terms of character and mood.

The acting is uniformly excellent; in addition to the two leads, Li Kechun, who plays Yun’s schoolteacher mother, stands out for her role as a woman confused by modernity and torn between the pressure to conform and maternal love.

Dam Street is a measured drama replete with human warmth and sadness, and marks the maturity of an auteur who looks set to rival Li Shaohong (Baober In Love) for the title of mainland China’s most significant female director.

Production companies
Laurel Films
Rosem Films
Fonds Sud Cinema

International sales
Bavaria Film International

Executive producer
Fang Li

Co-producer
Sylvain Bursztejn

Screenplay
Li Yu
Fang Li

Cinematography
Wang Wei

Editor
Karl Riedl

Production design
Cai Weidong

Music
Liu Sijun

Main cast
Liu Yi
Huang Xingrao
Li Kechun
Wang Yizhu