Tuesday 6 October 2009

Mao's Last Dancer


Ma and I met when we both worked in China in the early 1980s so we looked forward to seeing Mao's Last Dancer.

It tells the story of the Chinese peasant boy chosen to study ballet who subsequently settled in the West.

The scenes set in China brought back plenty of memories for us, set as they are at the same time we were in the country. I was amused by an early scene of the school children singing The East is Red, a tune which the clocktower on Beijing's Railway Station chimed every hour on the hour and which echoed in my apartment throughout my posting to China.

The ballet sequences are impressive even for someone like myself without any great interest in the art.

Quite a number of the interior and street scenes supposedly set in Houston Texas were familiar and recognisable to me as in fact they were filmed in Sydney. This was a bit of a distraction but we enjoyed the film nonetheless.

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