The Case for the Yellow River

"The hit of the 38th Wellington Film Festival", the paper cried. Truth be told though, I did not go to Up the Yangtze based on that recommendation, but rather on the premise of the film: a documentary on the changing lives of those who live along the banks of the Yangtze river in China, now that the Three Gorge Dam project, the largest dam in the world, is nearing completion.

To be brutally honest, by the end of the film, I was quite disappointed. The main focus of the documentary was the family of "Cindy" Yu Shui, a poor family who live in a ramshackle hut near the rising river's edge, and her subsequent departure to work on the ships that ferry Western tourists up and down the river. A second, shorter story follows "Jerry" Chen Bo Yu, a wildly egotistical man also starting work on the same boat, and we also get to "talk" with interesting men from along the river, with different perspectives on what is happening and its impact on their lives.

While the blurb on the Paramount site says that "Director Yung Chang lets the subjects speak for themselves and avoids unnecessary commentary", I found that this was least true for the Yu family, whose story seemed to be "dramatically retold" for the cameras. Cindy herself rarely got the chance to speak directly about the various things happening in her life. The other people in the film - all real people to be sure - had the chance to let their individual personalities and perspectives shine through. While the director's commentary is fairly spartan, it tends to be recollections of his grandfather's poetry about the river, though without an actual frame of reference to see what has changed since that time, it is hard to really empathise with his wistful reminiscences. That plus the fact the actual project or the history of the river itself were virtually ignored left me without a context to properly place the signifcance of the changes.

The thing I had to remember for most of the Yu family story was that these are real people, real lives. Bureaucrats in China probably have ignored the plight of all those displaced by the project, and the tourist industry that has arisen in the wake of Western interest in the project probably has given rise to all sorts of hideous fake "traditional" pagentry and a service industry based on exploiting its staff. All the other people we encountered felt real, even when spouting tourist propaganda, but the Yus were the only ones to feel (and I hate to use the word) exploited by the film makers.

For my money, the documentary China Blue on the jeans manufacturing industry is a far better film than this one. Not to completely slate Up the Yangtze, but I was left with the feeling that the fascinating stories of the people in the film were done a disservice, in particular the Yus. For me, there is nothing worse than a documentary feeling fake. When the stories told were obviously true and the feelings real (like Jerry, and the man in the town where fighting with officials broke out), the film soared.

Verdict: A worthy goal, but I thought it didn't quite get it right, and it certainly did not live up to the hype. 1 gorge out of 3.