Blind Mountain

Li Yang’s Blind Mountain (Mang Shan, Hong Kong, 2007) is about the bride traffic in rural China in the 1990s. A beautiful young university graduate, Bai Xuemei, is lured to a job in a distant northern province under pretence of working to repay her education debt. In reality she has been sold by a fake employment agency to a peasant family to be the bride of their dullish, coarse son. After he beats and rapes her into submission, she is free to move about: the village is isolated by a mountain whose rough terrain makes escape nearly impossible.

The enticing beauty of the landscape, the vivid palette of colours of this prosperous and cemented village, the seeming kindness of the villagers who try to help her "fit in" and admire her for her education – all of these are in stark contrast with Bai Xuemei’s loneliness and despair.

There are two other trafficked women in the village, but they have now become dutiful wives and mothers (one was crippled by her husband as punishment for trying to escape). Bai Xuemei’s refuses their resignation and it is her fierce vitality and determination to escape that is at the centre of the story. The film becomes edgy and nervous as tensions build around these contrasts: the suspense surrounding her escape attempts reaches almost unbearable heights at times.

Ultimately she is abandoned and betrayed by everyone: the village school teacher who loves her, the bumbling police, the villagers themselves. The entire community has conspired to keep her as theirs, because first and foremost she is paid for property to be retained. As the story unrolls, the mountain in the backdrop, imposing and final, swells into a vast metaphor for humankind’s blindness to its own greed and inhumanity.

An "incident" ends the film with unexpected suddenness. In the flash of a second an irrevocable fate crashes down upon her like the final pounding of a gavel, leaving us to imagine a worse life than that of a trafficked wife, in this deviously organised little mountain kingdom, where justice and compassion are flouted with the unanimous complicity of its inhabitants.

Submitted to 20 cuts by censors before the film could leave China, Blind Mountain received standing ovations. Like all exceptional films, it stays with you long after you have left the theatre.

Butterfly Woo Dip.





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