In his masterful and haunting documentary “Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.
Looming over the film, physically and metaphorically, is the nearly complete Three Gorges Dam in the interior province of Hubei; begun in 1994 and scheduled for completion in 2011, it’s the largest hydroelectric project in history, and China’s most ambitious public-works effort since the Great Wall. Some scientists theorize the collected weight of water may affect the Earth’s rotational axis.
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Some 1.4 million residents have been relocated by the Chinese government to date, with the total number of those affected estimated at up to 4 million, or 1.5 percent of the provincial population. “Up the Yangtze” shows us a handful of people desperately trying to adapt.
Luxury ships, dubbed “Farewell Cruises,” take wealthy Western tourists up the Yangtze for a last look at the ghost towns and cliff faces before they disappear beneath the current.
As houses and livelihoods are taken away, a number of locals have no choice but to work on the riverboats. The movie shows the growing pains of the region’s young people as they join the service class.
The film’s heroine, as such, is Yu Shui, a 16-year-old girl whose dreams of going to college aren’t taken seriously by anyone but herself. Her parents, illiterate subsistence farmers, hustle her into a job on the “Victoria Queen,” where she’s given a uniform, an English name — Cindy — and put to work washing dishes. She weeps at the injustice and slips into a funk.
Some of the film’s funding comes from National Geographic, and the visuals have a luxuriant, coffee- table splendor that sometimes works at cross-purposes with the film as a whole. Yet Chang has a real gift for the symbolically loaded shot: a Lancôme poster next to a Chinese flag, Yu Shui’s father passing Chinese sightseers as he carries a dresser on his back up the long slope from the water.
While the film rarely explicitly addresses government policy, there’s not one frame that isn’t political.
“Up the Yangtze”
Not rated. 1 hour, 33 minutes. Directed by Yung Chang. With Campbell Ping He, Cindy Shui Yu, Jerry Bo Yu Chen. Opens today at the Mayan.
