B and I watched this longish Chinese film about young people, their lives before, during and after Tianenmen Square. Very well acted, very explicit sexually, this explores 20 years of chaos in Chinese history/culture/life. It follows a young woman, her lovers, their lives, and their affairs from their times as passionate students probing desire to adults mired in an inability to break from their lives and truly love. The personal is political but not in the sense that it’s about Democracy. The massacre marks a break point in many of their lives, but as young people, it’s more about sex, passion, desire, and the emptiness that pervades the lives of many afterwards, the compromises they and we make. It’s very French in style and received financial backing for distribution from French producers after its showing at Cannes. It also earned its director and producer and 5-year ban from filmmaking in China. See the special feature on the issue of censorship on the DVD. The politics were hardly clear or harshly presented here, however. Rather like a Chinese take on “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” with a French sense of despair, existential emptiness, and endless smoking of cigarettes. Sex is politics but only intimately, not as gender. I’d have tightened up the editing and cut about 30 minutes from various scenes. That’s another sense in which this is heavily influenced by French cinema