Review of Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998) by Dyllan R — 15 Jun 2013

The main actress Li Xiao Lu is a household name and face in China. More recognizable to most Chinese than the American President or Oprah. She has become one of the great comic actresses of her generation, believe it or not (if you have only seen her in this).

She is a modern young woman in real life and by training yet all the gestures and expression in this film are acted, as the girls of that generation she is playing behave and express quite differently to Li Xiao Lu's generation, something we do not appreciate in the West and where, when we do similar (as in costume dramas) we do it so poorly, the actors with little or no knowledge of the past (the worst example to mind being the BBC series on the Pre-Raphelites, which was an absolute travesty of justice) we homogenize the past into our present moeurs of sex and violence and personality.

This film therefore shows absolute tour-de-force acting by Li Xiao Lu, by any standard. The film has a whole symbolic meaning that reverberates through the drama. It is about the death of beauty and the consequent suicide of culture.

Xiu Xiu is the perfect flower of her culture (of the past), of inward beauty (that might not be able to be appreciated by most Western eyes watching this). Portraying the inwardness of beauty is the triumph of Li Xiao Lu's unsurpassable acting.

This beauty starts out in innocence, but gets sullied, then trampled on. The final scene (sorry to give it away, if you haven't seen the film don't read on) is the man (who in his way loves her) shoots her in the face with the rifle, to put her out of her misery, as you would an animal.

Then he kills himself, because if you destroy beauty you destroy yourself. This is what China has been doing - what America leads the way on. The power of the ending is precisely because of the symbolic backdrop: it is beyond tragedy, I don't know what it is.

Heartbreaking I guess. Joan Chen's achievement was in providing the frame for all this and the thought. She's a great woman.