Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl

A couple of film festivals ago the Chinese film Red Cherry stood out as a wrenching, visually striking chronicle of cherubic innocence violated by the horrors of history. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl tries the same with mixed results. Directed by the fine Chinese actress Joan Chen, this one is set in China in the mid '70s, during the Cultural Revolution, when educated city teenagers were deported to primitive provinces for "re-education." Among those is the precocious gamine of the title (Lu Lu), who finds herself sharing a tent in the western wastes with Jao Li (Lopsang), a Tibetan herdsman who lost his manhood when captured during a tribal war. Xiu Xiu and Jao Li represent the purity of China's future and past, and both of them are exploited by callous bureaucrats, ideologues, and ruthless self-seekers, as Xiu Xiu is abandoned by the government and left to sleep with anyone promising her a ticket home while her impotent protector looks on. The chemistry between the two leads is tender and touching, and the landscape provides a pathetic fallacy of staggering beauty, but Xiu Xiu too often gets sent down the primrose path of overwrought melodrama. Screens at the Copley Place Saturday, September 12 at 7:15 and 9:30 p.m. and Sunday, September 13 at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 and 3:30 p.m.

-- Peter Keough

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Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

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More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

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