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Telling Beijing's Story...

Early in Giuseppe Tornatore's Reunion, the Italian director engages in a bit of misdirection. The short film, one of five in the VISION BEIJING film project, starts with a look at a Beijing bus driver in traffic who spots an elderly woman exercising in a park. At her home the bus driver reflects on what she’s seen and begins drafting a note. But suddenly, the film shifts from the workaday city to something out of a costume drama: an empress, in full regalia, receiving a visitor under a pavilion. Where are we, and when? In the moment of confusion, a director yells, “Cut!” We are  ––it turns out––in a movie.

That trick by Tornatore, the director of Cinema Paradiso, relies on a particular power of filmmaking, the way that motifs play into a viewer's expectations, creating an entire world with a few cues. The ancient Chinese empress and the modern Chinese bus driver can't fit into the same movie, unless you shake the frame. The empress is an actress (an actress playing an actress, if you shake the frame a little harder) and a former schoolmate of the bus driver (who herself looks more like an actress than a bus driver). They come together in a cinematic Beijing.