Mao’s Last Dancer

A film adapted from a real life. Li Cunxin is the child of a poor family in rural China. One day a delegation comes to the school; they are choosing children for the state ballet academy and the teacher points at him. He is sent to Beijing. The training is hard; the hours are long, the discipline strict, and part of the instruction is political. Li is poor at it for the first years; then a teacher shows him something else and the boy changes. Years later an invitation arrives. A ballet company in Houston asks for him for a few months and Li goes to America. What he sees there is the opposite of what he was taught. He also meets a woman and they decide to marry. That is where the trouble starts: his staying is not a matter of permission but becomes an incident between two states. There is a wait of many hours at the consulate and the story reaches the press. What the film is interested in is not dance but belonging: Li can settle fully neither in the country he stays in nor with the family he left, and he does not see them for years. The dancing was shot with real dancers and held long. Chi Cao plays Li; he is a professional ballet dancer. Bruce Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan, Joan Chen and Amanda Schull are in the cast. The source is Li Cunxin's own memoir. Bruce Beresford directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes dance films and biographies drawn from real lives. Who it is not for: anyone looking for political depth; the film leaves China largely one-dimensional.