Blind Mountain.

While Blind Mountain, opening today at Film Forum, where it runs through March 25, has some reviewers reaching far and wide for comparisons, the New York Times' Manohla Dargis sticks to Li Yang's first feature: "Tough and stripped to the narrative bone, Blind Shaft has a tighter, faster feel than this new film, in large part because it's about men who make (bad) things happen in the world, while Blind Mountain hinges on a woman whose imprisonment - conveyed through claustrophobic rooms and taunting landscapes framed by windows and doors - paradoxically helps hobble the storytelling.... Yet while there's something terribly frustrating about her stop-and-go motion, this sense of irritation, of feeling bound by and to the story, is the point."

Updated through 3/15.

"Not simply exploitation with an air of social conscience, Yang's film is rather more like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days [than Hostel: Part II] in that it uses as its raw material a contentious women's rights issue to drive home a broader point about the political and the personal," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot. It's "forceful and provocative, even if it fails to strike as deeply empathic a note."

"Picture a Zhang Yimou pastoral with a pigtailed Gong Li or Zhang Ziyi getting gangbanged by an entire household and you'll see how far Chinese cinema has come in the past decade, for better or worse," suggests Kevin Lee in Slant. "There may not be a lot of nuance to this dystopia, but Li's monomaniacal insistence on showing the dark despair lurking in the unheralded corners of Chinese society achieves its own strident integrity and leaves a haunting, inconsolable impression."

"Watching Blind Mountain, it's impossible not to think of Lars von Trier's Dogville," or at least for Benjamin Strong, writing in the L Magazine. "But Von Trier's sanctimonious fantasy of American inhumanity takes place, literally, on a black-and-white stage. Yang, in contrast, shows a more complex understanding of the motives behind cruelty."

Earlier: S James Snyder in the New York Sun.

Update, 3/15: "Both Blind Shaft and Blind Mountain are blunt and raw, distinguished by the immediacy of their hand-held camerawork and by screenplays that don't truck with narrative ambiguity," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "The viewer isn't asked to fill in any gaps; anyone who doesn't know what's going on in these films must've fallen asleep. And given how arresting the action is in both, nodding off is highly unlikely."

Posted by dwhudson at March 12, 2008 8:41 AM