Over the weekend we saw City of Joy. Dumb and predictable. I was struck by some resemblences to Lao She's Camel Xiangzi/Rickshaw. Duh, both stories involve rickshaw pullers. However, in addition, both stories have prostitutes that the protagonist wants to "save". But more to the point, the thinking behind the stories represents two poles along one line: successful collective action, represented by City of Joy, and futile individual action, represented by Rickshaw.

Whoops, but that's about it. Anyway, I can't help but feel that with a few exceptions, City of Joy was just a little too positive, but of course it had to be, being a Hollywood movie. And of course it had to have a white savior, otherwise presumably the white audience couldn't relate. Finally, some reviewers took exception to Patrick Swayze in the role of white savior. He was OK (funny how young he looked). My problem was more with the annoying character he had to play--angst-ridden and tempermental. And also the fatuous psychology behind his troubles. But we were able to watch it to the end.

We then saw Indochine. Epic, and pretty much what Rita Kempley says. Certainly not as predictable in the same way as City of Joy, although as soon as I saw Catherine Deneuve's character carrying on with a man young enough to be her son, I suspected that her adopted daughter (played by Linh Dan Pham) would fall in love with the same man. Perhaps I also should have expected that Linh's character would have become a Communist. (Speaking of Linh, it was interesting that my wife complained that by East Asian standards, she's no beauty--her skin's too dark, and her face is too round. Maybe us round-eyes like the round faces because of our round eyes.) Nevertheless, even if there's nothing about the abuses of the Communists, the French colonials aren't depicted as a hundred percent evil. Kempley says the protagonists see themselves as nurturing the Indochinese rather than oppressing them, a notion she labels as "presumptuous if not altogether indefensible". In other words, it's politically incorrect to say anything positive about colonials. Anyway, there was something I found very French in the way the characters would mull over what had happened to them, in a way far removed from the annoying blatherings of the Westerners in City of Joy. Still, once again it's pretty much the East through Western eyes.