A Narrow Lane Celebrity

Three neighbors employ wit, feeling, and fervor, to outwit, for a time, nasty Red Guards and corrupt officials. Zhu Xu plays Sima Shouxian, an apparently diffident, pedantic oddball craftsman who makes funeral wreaths. But underneath Sima’s shy exterior is a razor-sharp intellect and he takes every opportunity to use his traditionally florid linguistic virtuosity to skewer the petty and pompous Red Guards lording it over his neighborhood. Sima insists on using meaningful language, something which protects him from fearing the ideological fundamentalism metastasizing around him. When Sima and his two neighbors – the persecuted widow Zhuo Chunjian and rough-and-tumble dog butcher Han Niusan – are forced into a political reeducation programme, he contrives to get them out with some clever strategies. —Shelly Kraicer