Movie Reviews: Indestructible, Reprise, Water Lillies

 
GO  UP THE YANGTZE “It’s hard being a human, but being a common person in China is even more difficult,” says one tearful shopkeeper along the soon-to-be-submerged banks of the Yangtze River in Sino-Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang’s lucid, beautifully observed portrait of the same incipient flood zone that served as the backdrop for Jia Zhangke’s Still Life and its companion documentary, Dong. Whereas Jia turned his attention to the 2 million zombielike former residents forced to relocate on account of the world’s largest hydroelectric-dam project, Chang focuses on the luxury pleasure boats that sail up and down the titular waterway, offering tourists a “farewell” cruise through this ghostly landscape of crumbling buildings painted with water-level markers (150m, 175m, etc.). The ships themselves are hardly less surreal, as elderly cabaret singers rub elbows with young Chinese staffers who have been given American names and instructed in the politesse of dealing with the (mostly) Western clientele. (“Don’t talk about monarchies, royal families, Northern Ireland or the independence of Quebec.”) For 16-year-old Yu Shui (a.k.a “Cindy”), whose subsistence-farming family will soon be displaced by the flooding, the job is her sole hope of someday being able to afford a higher education. Meanwhile, the cocky city boy Chen Bo Yu (a.k.a “Jerry”) sees the cruise as the ideal place to perfect his English and his outgoing Westernized demeanor. By journey’s end, Chang has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground. (Royal; Playhouse 7; TownCenter 5) (Scott Foundas)

GO  WATER LILLIES The camaraderie of the undesired: Invisible to everyone else, pinched, late-blooming Marie (Pauline Acquart) pairs with Anne (Louise Blachère), a heavy girl with a pasty food-court complexion. Cruelly cloddish on dry land, Anne provides their only link to the larger social world through her synchronized-swimming extracurriculars. Complications come at poolside, where the two-girl clique meets Floriane (Adele Haenel), a swimmer who’s come through puberty with all the right proportions and whose beauty entrances Marie. Flo won’t give it up to her appropriately hot partner, François, after whom Anne ineptly pines — and so a trickle-down chain of exploit-the-weaker is set in motion. The p.o.v. is fixed: Neither object of desire is seen outside of Marie’s and Anne’s lives; adult authority is alluded to but never present (the effect is more Massacre at Central High than Peanuts). Completing the convergence of rare young talents is the director, 27-year-old Frenchwoman Céline Sciamma. Her feature debut doesn’t quite have the stun of discovery — mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all — though she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image. (Nuart) (Nick Pinkerton)