Mao’s Last Dancer is based on the autobiography of Li Cunxin, a Chinese dancer who did a Nureyev and defected to the West in 1981.
The autobiography was a bestseller, hence — no doubt — the movie. And hence, too, the problems of making a film “based on a true story” while also necessarily fictionalising it in the filmmaking. One wonders whether the occasional awkwardness or apparent lacuna, as well as the very standard narrative moments, are simply a function of “real life” or an oversight on the part of those who made the film.
At least the actual dancing in the movie has the power and resonance of authentic performance. Li is played by Chi Cao, principal dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which gives the role oomph, because he can really dance — as well as act. The dancing is certainly impressive, even if some of the productions seem a little odd, perhaps that’s a result of trying to recreate the inevitably dated look of ballets staged in the 1970s and 1980s.
Li was born in a rural province of China in 1961. At the age of 11, he was whisked away to join the Beijing Ballet Academy — not, it seems, because he had evinced any particular talent for the art form, but because a teacher desperately wanted someone, anyone, to be chosen from her class.
What follows has much in common with the equivalent passages from a martial-arts movie, with the training montages, the sweaty faces, and so on. There’s even a benevolently tough teacher who encourages and pushes the young Li to greater heights — or perhaps that should be heavier heights, because it involves walking around with weights on his feet. This all helps to make him the excellent dancer he will become.
In parallel with this part of the movie is an insight into the ambiguity at the heart of communist China’s embrace of ballet. It’s as though there was a desire to match up to the West by learning one of the West’s great art forms, while at the same time the very form clashed with China’s stated ideological aims. There is a rather amusing intervention from a cultural commissar in Mao’s Last Dancer, indicating how such forms as ballet were supposed to be brought in line with the propagandistic aims of the state. Thus we get a ballet about heroic revolutionaries fighting for freedom or whatever — a peasantry-driven people’s revolution en pointe!
And then, of course, there’s Li’s own ambivalence about communism versus capitalism. Barely done with his ballet-school training, he is spirited to the United States by Ben Stevenson of the Houston Ballet (played by Bruce Greenwood) on a student programme. There, Li is naturally overwhelmed by the plethora of products and the consumer lifestyle of the US. He tries to cling to the communist ideals with which he was inculcated even as he is drawn to the luxury and “freedom” of the West. There is a rather touching scene in which Li pops into the Chinese embassy to get some moral guidance on the matter.
But, in the end, it’s the call of the West that is strongest, and Li decides to defect. This leads to a stand-off in the Chinese consulate in Houston. Kyle MacLachlan, who has aged rather well since he played an FBI agent in Twin Peaks, has an amusing role as the huckster lawyer trying to keep Li in the US, and the whole episode is one of the best in the film. In fact, it’s the dramatic centre around which the film revolves.
Adjacent to that, however, is also the issue of Li’s falling in love with a young American dancer called Elizabeth Mackey (Amanda Schull). This burgeoning relationship is partly a spur to his defection and partly a way of legalising his desire to stay in the US. The confusions around this are played out in the film, especially when his wife asks him about his motives for marrying her. Li gives the right answer, but that’s the last we see of Mackey. Later Li appears to be married to someone else, and the film declines to clarify matters.
That seems an oversight, especially as the love angle (and Mackey’s loyalty to Li) is made so much of earlier. Their romance is touchingly presented, framed as part of Li’s increasing infatuation with life in the US. In fact, the idea that he will want to abandon China and stay in the US is something of a fait accompli. It’s assumed Li will want the freedom of the US; the ties holding him to China, and any dilemma he might have, are rather underplayed.
And then the last third of the film has to play catch-up, rushing through another decade or two to bring things to a conclusion — and that would need to be a “happy” one, a feel-good ending. After the relatively careful delineations of the first two thirds, this feels somewhat jarring. And where we conclude isn’t particularly enlightening or thrilling: what it adds up to is something along the lines of “Chinese not so bad after all”.
There are two ending passages, a climax of a kind and then a denouement. Both are pumped for as much triumphal sentimentality as the film can muster, and at this point the viewer begins to feel the stressful stretch between “true story” and Hollywood-style narration. You begin to wonder how many liberties have been taken with the “truth” to squeeze another emotional reaction from the viewer.
Be that as it may, Mao’s Last Dancer has a certain amount to re-commend it, not least the dancing. Li’s own story is an interesting and moving one, and the film as a whole will touch many hearts, I’m sure. I found it touched mine, minimally, at moments; for the rest, it’s let down by the sheer conventionality of the storytelling.