How do you say, "Cinema, blue, blue, we're crazy about you" in Chinese? I would say that Zhang Yimou (and the director here he) made, like many masters of world cinema, his declaration of love in cinema.
The plot develops during the Cultural Revolution, around a bobbin with a film magazine (who remembers such a fashion in our country in Soviet times, before a feature film to let something useful educational in the opinion of the party).
A prisoner who has escaped from the camp, who is being searched for at the railway stations, comes to the collective farm No. 1 to show this same magazine under No. 22. He somehow found out that it showed his daughter. On an AWOL absentee date, so to speak. However, the session is already over, and the tapes will now go to the collective farm No. 2. No problem, but here one of the bobbins is stolen by a girl - an orphan and exactly the same one. The chase begins with a change of hands. As a result, the film still appears in the second collective farm, only in an inappropriate state. Falling out of the bobbin, in unwound form, she drags behind the cart along a dusty dirt road.
And then the viewer plunges into a time when cinema was something akin to magic, and a film mechanic is something like a local shaman or wizard. For the screening of the film, perhaps for the 10th or 20th time, the whole village is going from small to large, yet they participate in the rescue of the film, during which the film mechanic turns into a conductor and commander. Patriotic songs sounding in the film are sung by all the audience in the hall.
One second, that's how much time a fugitive father sitting in a fight can contemplate his daughter on the screen carrying some kind of bag while unloading at the enterprise. A fourteen-year-old girl, carrying weights along with adults, glows with happiness, participating in something great, building a bright future. This should be repeated at least a hundred times.
A rather touching picture, snatching a historical segment from the life of the Chinese hinterland, against which the fates of several small people are intertwined. The first minutes did not make an impression, but then the film literally fascinated, I recommend. Young Liu Haoqun, plagued and ruffled, charm itself.
8 out of 10