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'Blind Mountain'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

March 14, 2008

In the early 1990s, an enthusiastic young college grad named Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) journeys to a remote mountain village with her new boss and co-worker to begin her first job. She thinks she is going to be selling herbal medicine, but instead is abducted and pressed into service as the slave wife of a farmer, who has bought her for 7,000 yuen. Bai's attempts to escape and send out letters to her family are foiled at every turn. Everyone in the community, from the farmer's doggedly alert mother, to the village chief, to the other kidnapped brides (who are resigned to their fate), conspires to subdue and constrain the new captive. When government officials come to the village to do their regular inspection, Bai is sequestered in the forest with fellow illegal brides and village reprobates until the delegation leaves.

Director Li Yang synthesizes Bai's story from actual accounts from the hundreds of thousands of women and children kidnapped in China each year (some of whom take some of the roles). It's a shocking and ultimately despairing indictment of a culture gone collectively bonkers. The heat of empathetic outrage that Li generates from the audience is enough to make the theater combust.

BLIND MOUNTAIN (unrated). 1:37 (scenes of rape, violence and cruelty). In Mandarin with English subtitles. At the Film Forum, Manhattan.