I watched Ying Ning's I Love Beijing tonight. Apparently, it's the third of a loosely connected trilogy about the rapid evolution of Beijing and life within this changing city, though I have not seen the other two. The title of the film seems rather ironic in the context of a film where many of the characters seem to come from outside the city and display a sense of indifference to this city and its endless construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
The story follows the cab driver Dezi, who uses his job and his car to ignore all other issues in his life. He seems to wander through the city in search of love, and finds only the fleeting semblance of love, and perhaps that is where the less ironic interpretation of the title comes from, this search for love, as Dezi drives through the streets of this city. The film obliquely observes the urban migration of rural Chinese from a distance without really commenting, Dezi meets women, both peasant and intellectual, he's both rewarded and abused, he finds love and loses it, most of all he seems to use his self-bought cab to avoid dealing with real life, which is also rather ironic, seeing as the film itself is a fantastic example of just how well cinema vérite can turn out, when a director doesn't go overboard.
7.5/10
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