Mao’s Last Dancer is a beautiful tale filled with sumptuous costumes and sublime dancing. This is a story of freedom and learning to fly, and although it has a few inevitable clichés, the movie as a whole manages to gracefully pirouette away from being overly corny.
Mao’s Last Dancer is based on a true story, and centres on Li Cunxin who is the sixth son of a peasant family living in a poverty-stricken Chinese village. It is 1972, in the midst of the infamous Cultural Revolution and Li (played as a child by Huang Wen Bin) is plucked from his home and sent to Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy. Li is pushed to the limits in his dance training while being simultaneously educated with Maoist Communist doctrine. However, much like Baryshnikov, Li Cunxin was too talented to be hidden behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ for long, and is spotted by Houston Ballet director Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood).
The adult Li (played by Birmingham Royal Ballet principal Chi Chao) is seconded to America where he learns that the West is not as awful as he had been taught. Most importantly, Li is set free to dance traditional ballet and is no longer forced to participate in propagandist military-style Chinese ballet. The real struggle in this movie is not so much Li seeking freedom from a totalitarian state, but of the struggle he faces for his own artistic soul. Li also falls in love with an American dancer named Liz (Amanda Shull), and begins plotting a way to stay in America with the assistance of some friends and immigration lawyer Charles Foster (Kyle MacLachlan). He is agonisingly aware that his decisions may negatively impact on the fate of his family back home, and has to learn to live with the fact that he may never see them again.
Although nearing the end of his directing shelf-life, Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) does an excellent job with this movie. He was allowed unprecedented access to Chinese locations and these scenes in particular are exquisitely shot. More than that, he manages to steer away from typical anti-Communist and America-is-great stereotypes, and in this Beresford manages to draw strong performances from all his key role players. Key to this is that that even the Communist leaders who attempted to prevent Li’s bid for freedom were portrayed as being both human and somewhat fragile. By concentrating on the human stories behind the story, rather than his own version of political propaganda, Beresford has produced a movie that is hauntingly beautiful from beginning to end. The ballet scenes are worth the entry price alone as we are shown dancing that quite literally takes your breath away with its heady mix of balanced strength and mesmerising grace. Even if ballet is not exactly your cup of tea, you will struggle not to be affected by the sheer artistry of some of the scenes.
In summary, this is a story about how beautiful humanity can be when we give of the best of ourselves. It reminds us of what we can achieve and that at the end of the day, the human beings and relationships behind all the dancing, politics and ideologies are most important.
Mao’s Last Dancer is full value for its four stars out of five.