Film review

Based on the bestselling memoir by Li Cunxin , Mao's Last Dancer is the kind of rags-to-riches story that is always going to be popular on a human level - but in political terms belongs to the Cold War era.

Directed by Bruce Beresford and written by Jan Sardi, of Shine fame, the film plays its heart-wrenching moments for all it can get out of them and maintains some silly old-fashioned ideas about good versus evil, and the inescapable magnetism of American freedoms.

Not to say that chairman Mao's land of the little red book was a romantic, easy-to-live-in place, but when there's no attempt to interrogate the shortfalls of Reagan era America during the last days of the Cold War, then you're left with a lopsided, melodramatic tale of one poor kid's rise to fame and fortune that has some decently choreographed ballet scenes but little of anything else.

Cunxin went on to become a successful stockbroker and today travels the world explaining to executives of major corporations what they can learn from his story.

I met Cunxin earlier this year - he's a modest, nice guy, and the film of his book is per-fect for modest, nice people. It's full of the tropes of old Cold War dramas without any of the political intent, so the view of the village of his youth, and his experiences at ballet school in Beijing, are as facile and unquestioning as the view of the West.

When Madame Mao comes to the school and demands that the teachers increase the themes of arms and revolution in their ballets, the resulting choreography is ridiculous - as it should be - and causes a rift between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.

All of which is useful in explaining why Cunxin defected to the US in the 1980s but not very useful for providing a real sense of the dramatic tensions and human drama at the heart of the arts world in a communist country in the 1970s.

Even Beresford's best known melodramatic film, Driving Miss Daisy, had more of a sense of when to look a little more closely at things going on in the background.

What saves the film from complete disaster is the fact that Chi Cao, the actor who plays the adult Cunxin, can really dance, making the ballet scenes the most bearable parts of the story.

It's only when he has to deliver dialogue that you despair and find yourself wishing for the good old days of White Nights, when Baryshnikov taunted Gregory Hines by dancing around with a rouble between his teeth and a crazy glint in his freedom-loving eyes.