'Mao's Last Dancer' banned in China

You would think that a period piece that celebrates the accomplishments of a Chinese-born-and-trained ballet dancer would have a ready-made audience in the country where it was filmed and set.

But "Mao's Last Dancer" won't be showing in Chinese cinemas any time soon. (The film opens today in Philadelphia at the Ritz Five.)

"The Chinese government doesn't want anyone reminded that Chairman Mao was a lunatic," chuckled Bruce Beresford, the film's blunt Australian director.

"China stopped making movies about the Cultural Revolution as if they want to forget it," said Joan Chen, the Chinese-born actress who plays the mother who gives up her son to be raised and trained by the state during China's turbulent Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s. "They don't want to talk about it, and the young people don't want to know about it."

In the film, Li Cunxin (played by Chi Cao) comes to America in 1981. He has absorbed government propaganda that declared China to have "the highest standard of living in the world," that in America many were starving. Allowed to train with the Houston Ballet, Li sees an extravagant land of plenty, is stunned by America's level of freedom and decides to defect.

"In the hands of a less capable filmmaker . . . this film could easily have degenerated into a jingoistic anti-Communist diatribe," Bruce DeMara wrote in the Toronto Star.

But good reviews praising the film's sensitive treatment of the story and an Oscar-nominated director ("Tender Mercies," "Driving Miss Daisy") weren't enough to sway Chinese authorities, who have banned everything from "The Departed" (Chinese weapons smuggling) to "Avatar" (pulled from theaters over fear it would spur unrest).

"They allow you to film in China in two ways," explained Chen, who has worked in China and Hollywood since the 1980s. "If the film is a co-production, it has Chinese involvement. The other way is assisted production. No Chinese involvement. That's what we did. Automatically, you are disqualified."

She fretted over this "because China today is nothing like it was 30 years ago."

Beresford agreed.

"Under Mao, people were literally starving. He'd put out orders to kill all the sparrows in the country or that no one was allowed to eat at home. They had to eat in communal kitchens. The difference today is just shattering. Beijing, when we were shooting there, was in many ways just like Los Angeles."

But he knew going in that this wasn't a film for the booming China market.