Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl

Directed by Joan Chen
A Stratosphere Entertainment release

recommended

Boys and girls are dressed alike, singing in unison, sitting rapt before a movie screen that shows glorious war footage, the triumph of good over evil. These early images in Joan Chen’s debut feature, Xiu Xiu, the Sent Down Girl, set the scene in mainland China during the Cultural Revolution (mid-1970s), in a city called Chengdu. As the kids are watching the war stories unfold on screen, their attention is suddenly diverted from projected battles to real soldiers, who appear in the dark with intrusive flashlights and weapons, rounding up the children, demanding that they "forget their ancestors."

This ominous opening sequence looks forward to the themes to be explored with excruciating care in Chen’s film, the ways that the Revolution’s surging rhetoric and sincere idealism were overcome by violence and fear, modern destructive technologies and some very traditional notions about class, gender and power. Written by director/co-producer Chen and Yan Geling, and based on his novella Tian Yu, it follows the short life of 15-year-old Wen Xiu (played by Lu Lu). At first, Xiu Xiu (as she’s called by her family) is a willing, hopeful, enthusiastic participant in the government program. Her apprehension is revealed in graceful close-ups amid the chaos of her departure, but Xiu Xiu is determined to be obedient and good.

The bureaucracy has Xiu Xiu "sent down" from her home in the city to the desolate Tibetan borderlands, where she will learn horse herding from the master trainer Lao Jin (Lopsang). She’s told that following her re-education through six months of hard labor, she’ll return triumphant, ready to take an honorable position in the Girls’ Cavalry. When she arrives at Lao Jin’s place, however, Xiu Xiu is understandably worried: He lives in a tent in the middle of nowhere, his face is weather-beaten, his posture stooped. Rumor has it that he was castrated in a battle some years back.

While she’s somewhat comforted by his gentleness (and his apparent inability to make sexual demands on her), Xiu Xiu is also frustrated and bored by their crude existence. Lu Yue’s breathtaking, simple cinematography conveys both the stern beauty of the landscape and the void it represents for the city girl. She counts the days until her stint is up, marking them precisely on her calendar, and strings a blanket between her space and Lao Jin’s preserving her girlish sense of privacy.

Her teacher, meanwhile, is infinitely patient, humble and solicitous. When Xiu Xiu frets about the lack of facilities, he uses taped-together plastic tarps to build her a bath that warms in the sunlight. The appointed release day comes and goes with no one arriving to retrieve her, and Xiu Xiu begins to wonder at the wisdom of her elders, which she’s taken for granted until now. Eventually, she learns from a local vendor that the cavalry has been disbanded and indeed, she has been forgotten. Desperate to get back to the city, Xiu Xiu believes the vendor’s promise that he can arrange the paperwork, and she agrees to have sex with him. Other men from the city — small-time officials, good-timing soldiers — hear about her availability and come to visit. Silent and suffering, Lao Jin listens to the sounds coming from the other side of the blanket-wall that once signified her youthful modesty. Afterwards, he bathes her with water he rides miles to get.

From here, Xiu Xiu’s story is increasingly sad, but Chen’s choices remain surprisingly unsentimental. The girl’s transition from dutiful soldier to heartbroken victim is displayed through long-distance shots of the relentless, snowy landscape and tight, dingy interiors. At one point, Lao Jin comes home to see Xiu Xiu laughing and playing with one of her (unofficial) johns, seeming almost like the girl she was so recently. But she stops short when she sees Lao Jin, reminded that her existence is fixed, her possibilities over and done.

This indictment of the Cultural Revolution is structured as a kind of legend, the girl who suffered, who disappeared, who learned to despise herself. There’s a male voiceover (by offscreen Wang Luoyong) that refers to the "long periods" when there was "no news of her." This device seems eventually to approximate Lao Jin’s point of view, which comes to dominate Xiu Xiu’s. As the film pulls back, watching Xiu Xiu self-destruct through his eyes, the story of his impotence and pain seems almost to overwhelm hers. It’s as if her internal life is so devastated and her dreams so fractured that her perspective can’t even be imagined anymore. And that might be the saddest thing about it.