The brief prologue to visual artist Xu Ruotao’s adventurous debut feature shows youthful Red Guards on the rampage: shouting slogans, waving red flags, trashing the “capitalist-roader bourgeoisie.” It’s everybody’s stereotypical image of the Cultural Revolution, the ten chaotic years (1966-76) in which Mao and his “Gang of Four” acolytes set out to reinvent Chinese communism. We now know that the Cultural Revolution was essentially a political putsch: Mao regained power from Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and ruled (through a fog of dementia) until his death in 1976. But few understood that at the time. The film proper presents itself as a chronicle, chaptered in years from 1966 to 1976, but the action actually proceeds in reverse-chronological order. It opens in the dog years leading up to Mao’s death and the first chapter features the Tangshan earthquake (from 1976), climaxes in the bloody years when the Red Guards ran wild and closes with an idealistic communist hailing the coming upheaval. The longest chapter is 1973, when a gang of roving but already defeated Red Guards occupies an abandoned factory in which a vagrant is sleeping. Xu himself was born in 1968, at the height of Red Guard madness. His film is truly a rumination, a wry attempt to think through the meaning of one of history’s great cycles of idealism and disillusionment. —Tony Rayns
