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Buddha Mountain- Fan Bingbing, Sylvia Chang; Chen Bo-Lin, UPCOMING 3-4-2011 RELEASE
Topic Started: Nov 6 2009, 03:11 PM (3,149 Views)
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PRESS CONFERENCE - Li Yu ( Dam Street ) Next Feature
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Buddha Mountain
Cast
Sylvia Chang Fan Bingbing Chen Po Lin Fei Long Jin Jing Fang Li Bao Zhenjiang
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Introduction
Three young friends who are struggling to be independent from families rent rooms from former Peking Opera singer Master Chang. Young trouble makers run into Chang's bitter life and lead to a series of unexpected events.
Synopsis
A seasoned female singer and young trio share a house together, and through their interaction, the film depicts the meaning of love. Brilliantly directed by fusing an adolescent film of carefree youth, and a human drama about a soul-searching singer touched by tragedy. Sylvia Chang's poised and deep performance is a must-see, and young stars Chen Po Lin, and Fan Bingbing are superb.
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Peaceful ‘Buddha’ Bow
Taiwan-China Co-Prod. Rises Above Politics

The world premiere of director Li Yu’s China-Taiwan co-production Buddha Mountain unspooled without a hitch Sunday in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, proving that once in a while the culture of filmmaking can trump both sticky cross-Straits politics and past squabbles with China media authorities.

Chinese writer-director Li, whose 2007 Lost in Beijing was banned in China for its sexual content, managed this time to make a film with producer Fang Li, her equally controversial countryman, and Taiwan producer Peggy Chiao.

What’s more, Buddha, the story of two women trying to come to terms with past grievances in a spiritual setting, stars actors from both sides of the Taiwan Strait and it managed to win approval from China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television — the very body that censured Li her last time out.

After the lights raised on a packed TOHO Cinemas screening of Buddha, starring Fan Bingbing from China and Sylvia Chang from Taiwan, viewers showered praise and questions – in Japanese and Chinese of various accents.

Sporting gold and black sequined high top sneakers, Li apologized for Fan’s absence (“she’s shooting a movie in Korea”) and said she had just seen her own film for the first time on a big screen.

“This is the kind of film that people of Asia will understand. I was on the edge of my seat, sharing the emotions with you,” said Li, who co-wrote the film with producer Fang, and shot it in and around Chengdu, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

Buddha is a milestone for producer Fang, who has been in some form of trouble or another with Beijing’s media minders ever since founding his independent production company Laurel Films in 2000.

Fang helped Li make Lost in Beijing and also backed Summer Palace, a 2006 film that caused director Lou Ye and producer Nai An to be blacklisted in China for five years for its depiction of Chinese troops crushing the pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989.

Although Fang’s visited Japan many times before, he told the audience that Sunday was his first visit with one of his films in tow: “Please, if you like this film, tell your family and friends so we can get distribution in Japan.”

Fang’s plea highlighted the difficulty of making commercially viable art house films for today’s booming Chinese movie market.

Buddha is full of long tracking shots without dialogue, talk of the meaning of life, love and death and a swelling piano and strings score – a tough sell to exhibitors in China who have little tradition of showing anything but Hollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong martial arts co-productions and a rising tide of domestically made chick flicks and comedies.

Buddha sees actress Fan, one of China’s rising stars, in an emotional wrestle with the older Taiwan star Chang that leaves the meaning of love and forgiveness open to interpretation in the film’s dramatic last scene. Does Chang commit suicide or not?

“Giving the audience a clear answer, telling them that she’s good or bad, would have been a failure as a filmmaker,” director Li told a Chinese-speaking questioner after the screening. “It’s best to leave this up to the audience to decide for themselves.”

Li said that she and producer Fang, who also acts in the film, had worked very hard on writing the story together. She lavished praise on actress Chang and her countryman Chen Po-lin, saying they’d both delivered performances beyond her imagination.

Actor Chen, who greeted the crowd in beginner’s Japanese, said his biggest challenge on the “Buddha” set was compensating for his Taiwanese accent and “learning the voice of the young people of Sichuan.”

Chang, a veteran Taiwan actress, said that she’d talked with the director and producer a lot about the last scene: “As a mother, I struggled with the character’s decision to die. I wasn’t sure I would be able to wrestle with this emotionally complicated role.”

For his part, Fang described the film’s ending “as one of a commitment of love, not as a suicide,” he said.

“Love is about leaving the young with memories. It is only sad that young people these days don’t understand the meaning of love.” Appealing to the Buddhist culture shared by China and Japan, Fang told the audience: “We all understand that love and life comes around 30,000 times — that is the meaning of reincarnation.”

Asked how he’d been able to resuscitate his standing with China’s Film Bureau, Fang said: “The content of this film doesn’t not touch any politically sensitive nerves; and this time, our lovemaking is limited to two young people lying in the water together. We figured out ways to portray their love without showing sex.”

Fang said he had been talking with veteran Taiwan producer Chiao for seven or eight years but Buddha marked her first formal involvement in one of his films from the outset. Chiao consulted on the script from early in the process but did not invest money in the film, which took the bulk of its $1.8 million budget from a classmate of Fang’s who runs Huaxiang Real Estate, a developer in central China’s Hunan province.

“My friend made a lot of money and asked me what else I could do with it. I told him to make movies, warning him of the risks, but he said he was happy to help as long as the loss was not too great.”

Fang dismissed rumors that Buddha might be forced to withdraw from the festival under pressure from Beijing after several Chinese officials declined to participate in the opening night due to a spat over how Taiwan would be introduced. Since they split in 1949, Beijing’s one-party government has labeled the democratic and self-governing island of Taiwan as Chinese Taipei, as it is known when athletes from the island compete at the Olympics and other international sporting events.

“The Chinese film delegation that pulled out was largely from the China Film Group and doesn’t even represent the position of the Film Bureau,” Fang said. “It’s sad for our friends from Taiwan that they could not share the celebration together with us.”
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Buddha Mountain--Film Review
by Elizabeth Kerr

The Bottom Line
Quasi-coming of age drama that only misfires when it gets needlessly romantic.

Directed by
Li Yu
Starring Sylvia Chang, Fan Bingbing, Chen Po Lin, Fei Long, Jin Jing, Fang Li, Bao Zhenjiang

Three friends mature and a grieving mother embraces life anew in writer-director Li Yu's graceful exploration of loss and connection in Buddha Mountain, a film that could easily have been a rote, melodramatic weeper but is saved from that fate by some astute writing, strong performances and an almost utter dearth of expected devices.

Buddha Mountain is blessed with a cast of pan-Asian stars that should guarantee it moderate success in the region. Broad-spectrum festivals are likely to come calling, and the film's mainstream subject matter and high production values could make an art house release in select urban centers in Europe and North America a distinct possibility for creative distributors.

Ding Bo (Chen Po Lin, think a young Takeshi Kaneshiro before the surgeries) and his friends Nan Feng (Fan Bingbing) and Fei Zao aka Fatso (Fei Long) are a trio of 20-something outsider-y types that have no intention of sitting exams and getting into universities. When they need a new home for assorted reasons, they answer an ad placed by lonely, retired Chinese opera singer Chang Yue Qin (the awesome-as-usual Sylvia Chang), who is mourning the death of her son, and move into her sprawling Chengdu apartment. Right off the bat, the foursome clash over lifestyle and values, with the bratty trio seeing fit to steal from her and invade her privacy. However, slowly but surely a bond among them develops and everyone eventually learns something from the next.

Although there are jumps in the growth of the characters — and as such, the story — that seem to come out of nowhere (in one minute the kids find Chang irritating and “crazy,” in the next they're fussing over her following a suicide attempt), it's hard to find serious fault when the film has such an intense veracity otherwise. The “kids” start the film living willfully guilt-free, self-involved lives and grow into young adults. Chang starts off as a withdrawn hard-nose wallowing in remorse.

Watching the young trio teach Chang to let go and live, and in turn Chang teaching her boarders about responsibility — and acting as surrogate family for each other — without hysterics is a treat not commonly found in mainstream Asian cinema. In addition, Ding Bo's crew's friendship is based on genuine affection; Fatso's sole purpose is not to be the butt of jokes.

Buddha Mountain goes astray when it detours into romantic angst and sets aside its more compelling central story for a stretch of the third act. Ding Bo and Nan Feng's nascent romance is more of a distraction than a means of revealing more about the two characters. Li and co-writer Fang were doing fine beforehand and the love story simply comes across as forced (one expected device the film succumbs to). That, in turn, takes some of the wind out of the narrative sails, and too much of what follows their relationship troubles feels like filler. With the gratuitous romantic segment excised, Buddha Mountain would clock in at a more tightly focused and consistently engaging 90 minutes or so.

Section: Tokyo International Film Festival, Competition

Sales/Production: Laurel Films Company Ltd.

Producer: Fang Li.

Director: Li Yu.

Screenwriters: Li Yu, Fang Li.

Executive producer: Li Jingwei, Fang Li.

Director of Photography: Zeng Jian.

Production Designer: Liu Weixin.

Music: Peyman Tazdanian.

Editor: Karl Riedl.

Cast: Sylvia Chang, Fan Bingbing, Chen Po Lin Fei Long, Jin Jing Fang Li, Bao Zhenjiang.

No rating, 104 minutes

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Li Yu's Buddha Mountain is due to screen in March. 45 days of filming, Li Yu 8 hour cut is being chopped down to a viewable 2 hrs.

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