The Australia director Bruce Beresford has given us some wonderful movies, like "Breaker Morant," about 30 years ago, and winners like "Driving Miss Daisy," "Tender Mercies" and "Crimes of the Heart." A great surprise to see a trite tear-jerker like "Mao's Last Dancer," which opens here today.
Based on the autobiography of Chinese dancer Li Cunxin, who defected to the U.S. in the 1980s, after swooning over a blonde Texas ballet dancer and virgin and marrying her. They later were divorced and he married another dancer, Mary McKandry, with whom he now lives in Australia. In a hard-to-swallow sequence, he is a small boy in a small town in China when he is picked to study dancing in Houston. One of those cultural exchange things.
We get rather frequent cuts showing the difficulties of life in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the glories of disco in Houston. There's also an underlying sub-plot involving Li and Ben Stevenson, the director of the Houston Ballet who shares his house with the young Chinese and teaches him about the American way of life. The Chinese are most unhappy about Li's desire to move to Texas, raising some high-level diplomatic stakes, fierce arguments and much bluffing between the people on both sides and a climactic sequence when the concession stand is bound to run out of Kleenex.
This is not Beresford's high point as a director.
Mao's Last Dancer opens today at the Plaza Frontenac.
--Joe
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