Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl

An essential element of tragedy is that the ruinous events in question seem somehow, paradoxically, both avoidable and inevitable. Lose the former, obviously, and there's no semblance of dramatic tension; ditch the latter, on the other hand, as does this heavy-handed Cultural Revolution melodrama, and your protagonists become not so much the intended Victims of Fate's Vicissitudes as merely People Too Darn Stupid to Live. Conventionally pretty and briskly paced, the movie's reasonably diverting so long as actor-turned-director Joan Chen sticks to forging a standard-issue tentative bond between the title character who's "sent down" to the country to be culturally "educated" by a laconic Tibetan herdsman; small pleasures abound, like the look of giddy gratitude that ever-so-slowly dawns on Xiu Xiu's face when she sees the bathing pool that Lao Jin has dug for her. Once the plot's more deterministic gears commence a-grindin', however, what had seemed a delicate platonic romance gradually metamorphoses into the arthouse equivalent of a bad horror movie. The bleak finale, which is clearly supposed to be a furtive-tear-brusher, is simultaneously contrived and nonsensical; both characters sport puzzled expressions, as if thinking "I don't know why I'm doing this, but that's what it says in the script." Not recommended. (M. D'Angelo)