Along a sleepy Hunan riverside, two delinquent boys experience a summer of love and violence in Yang Heng’s visually stunning debut. Ali and Xiao Yu are two teenage rebels idling away their days along the banks of a river in Jishou, a quiet town in Hunan province. They steal motorbikes, bully and rob kids, sing karaoke and get into fist fights outside the local internet bar. But their rough exterior belies a deeper romanticism, and a tenderness unfolds between them and their teenage loves. As one day bleeds into the next in this impoverished rural setting, it becomes apparent that these sun-baked days of misspent youth will be the wildest, freest time of their lives. —IMDb
"[Betelnut is] like a narrative daydream by James Benning, a contemplative study of two mildly delinquent teenagers going nowhere.... Plenty happens—violence, theft, and two stalled relationships—but the formalist approach finesses a sense of perfect stasis, underlined by the absence of moralizing, melodrama, and character arcs. There are less than 50 shots, each one of them exquisite."—Tony Rayns
This films heart is in the characters, but its driven forward by it's environment. usually a film moves forward by the characters and what they do (or what happens to them), the surroundings are a backdrop ... Betelnut does the exact opposite.
The boys in the story seem more lost than the girls, who at least exercise regularly or go off to another city in search of jobs. I know this may be a pure coincidence because there are probably just as many male migrant workers in China as female ones. But in general I just felt really sad seeing the young people in this film doing nothing much but idling and smoking. Are they the unskilled labor pool of tomorrow?