MAO’S LAST DANCER LEAPS FROM THE SCREEN
Directed by Bruce Beresford, Mao’s Last Dancer is a biopic based on the 2003 autobiography of Li Cunxin (played by Chi Cao). With flashbacks throughout, the film traces Li’s life from 1961, when he is selected at grade school for ballet training in Beijing (a project of Mao’s wife), his discovery by choreographer Ben Stevenson (played by Bruce Greenwood) during a trip to China in 1978, and additional training with Stevenson’s Houston Ballet in 1979. Then in 1981, he marries an American, Elizabeth (played by Amanda Schull), and defects. He later revisits China, and his parents eventually visit him in Houston. Although much of the plot focuses on his struggle to succeed and those who helped him along the way, with lots of ballet enjoyment, dramatic changes in the politics of China provide the most important backdrop to his meteoric rise. The most notable incident is when he is imprisoned 21 hours at the Chinese consulate in Houston, how he is pressured to return to China, and then released through the intervention of the media, immigration attorney Charles Foster (played by Kyle MacLachlan), and a conversation between George H. W. Bush and Hua Gaofung. Ending titles reveal current positions of the principals, including Li’s remarriage and new residence in Australia. The Political Film Society has nominated Mao’s Last Dancer as best film exposé of 2010. MH
WOMEN ASSERT THEIR RIGHTS IN MADE IN DAGENHAM
Whereas the Equal Pay Act passed Congress in 1963, Britain granted equal pay based on sex in 1970. The dramatic story of the British struggle is told in the film Made in Dagenham, directed by Nigel Cole. When the film begins in 1968, 187 women are sewing upholstering at the Ford Motor Company plant in Dagenham, which employs 55,000 men in other job classifications. Their union representative, Albert Passingham (played by Bob Hoskins) comes into the production room to announce minor concessions for the women. The following morning Rita O’Grady (played by Sally Hawkins) notices that her son Graham (played by Robbie Kay) is unable to use his right hand to eat because his secondary school teacher, Mr. Clarke (played by Andrew Lincoln), punished him for forgetting to bring a protractor to class, using a rod. When she confronts the teacher, he responds that such a measure is necessary because members of the lower classes must be corrected to become better adapted to the upper grades. (Universal secondary education was a recent innovation in England at the time.) The film implies that her deferential resignation to the teacher’s attitude is later sublimated into antipathy toward the Ford management, which refuses to grant women the status of semiskilled laborers—and the corresponding higher pay grade–, when she soon becomes the outspoken leader of the demand of the women, whom she inspires to go full throttle as strikers. She is opposed not only by Ford executives but also by those higher up the union hierarchy. Even Labour Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (played by John Sessions) is afraid to support the women. Rather than caving in, she expands the struggle to other Ford plants, and women throughout Britain increasingly demand equal pay if not respect, including Barbara Castle (played by Miranda Richardson), a member of Macmillan’s Cabinet who often berates her civil service assistants in a manner never seen in the 1980s television series Yes Minister! The film demonstrates the success of a trade union struggle that seems ages ago but has many lessons for the present, particularly how to confront those in power and how to mobilize support for a just cause. Although the struggle occurred at the time of protests against the American role in Vietnam, that context is not mentioned. Whereas Henry Ford founded his company on the premise that autos should be affordable so that Ford employees can own one, Ford executives in the film are not cognizant that both men and women in Britain must bicycle to work at Ford, something that would surely change when women received equal pay. Ending titles point out that Britain’s equal pay act soon spread to the rest of industrialized countries. The Political Film Society has nominated Made in Dagenham as best film on human rights of 2010. MH