I LOVE BEIJING

Xiari Nuanyangyang

Director Ning Ying / 2001 / China

A modern-day taxi driver leads a second life as a would be Casanova. From the opening scene, where he poses for wedding photos with his bride to be, we watch through flashbacks as events unfold. The camera follows his clueless and sometimes bewildered responses to the changing landscapes swirling around him Dezi regularly picks up passengers, often women, whose lives he enters for a brief time, only to be thrust out. right back to where he was before. Along the way he is scammed, confused, used and even loved a little. Director Ning Ying's films betray a preference for people and institutions on the verge of extinction. In I Love Beijing, the city is an overwhelming mass of energy, constantly in motion, in which one is easily lost—a city in limbo, increasingly without a past, bustling with its present and ambitious, though ambivalent, towards its future. Following Dezi—always on the move, people and places zeroing in and out of his life, drifting between destinations and women—we are taken on a voyage. He is always on the move, much like Beijing's own search for an identity Sellout at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival

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