Blind Mountain (2007)

Yang Li's Blind Mountain features staggeringly beautiful countryside landscape and a story about big emotions - it is a film that battles patriarchy and the treatment of women as some sort of passive commodity. A young graduate, Xuemei, leaves for the countryside. She thinks she will go there for temporary work but instead she is kidnapped to be somebody's wife. She fights and fights and fights - only to be imprisoned in this home which is not hers. Every day, she waits for a letter, perhaps from her father. Blind Mountain deals with this subject in an passionate way and the portrayal of this injustice is both raw and rugged. That's the positive side. If I have a complaint, it's that things become rather black and white. The community in the film is shown as consisting of people totally in the grip of self-interest, fear and double-minded comforting words - everybody seems to play a game. And also: maybe it's that the material expresses a form of cruelty I can't handle to watch; instead of reacting, I  get numb. I don't know if that's the director would like, because in some ways, the end changes everything and makes me remember the film in a very different way that I would had the ending scene been different. I feel ambivalent about Blind Mountain, perhaps its story is so strong, but the cinematic grasp of this story comes out a bit undeveloped. I find many scenes very engaging (the scenes in which Xuemei tries to escape into town, trying to cross a mountain path) but the depiction of the rural family fails to engage me in the same way.