TABOOS FALL IN CHINA’S ‘UNDER BRIDGE’

‘Under the Bridge,” the second offering in the New Films From China series at the Grande 4-Plex downtown, addresses the lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution’s decade of hardships in a love story of such sincerity and delicacy that it overcomes occasional didactic and contrived moments.

The film is set in the present, in a Shanghai side street lined with craftsmen and artisans whose modest ventures in private enterprise are now tolerated by the government, although sometimes uneasily. A young bicycle repairman (Zhang Tielin) offers to share his space on the street in front of his home with a pretty young woman (Gon Xue), newly arrived from the countryside and now living in a tiny alley apartment nearby with her father (Qi Mengshi), a substitute teacher.

So gracious and lovely is this newcomer that the repairman’s dominating, long-widowed mother (Wang Pin) tries to play matchmaker for Gong Xue and her extremely shy son. For all her charm, however, there’s a chronic pensiveness in Gong Xue, which the neighborhood housewives soon attribute to the woman’s loss of her mother, who committed suicide rather than denounce her husband, imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Actually, Gong Xue is longing for her 5-year-old son (Fang Chao), born out of wedlock and left behind in the countryside in the care of an elderly aunt and uncle.

Eventually, Gong Xue dares to bring her son to live with her, which sets off the puritanical repercussions that she had anticipated. Suddenly, in Wang Pin’s eyes, she is no longer a fit bride for her only son, and the neighborhood children jeeringly label little Fang Chao a bastard. But “Under the Bridge” is about how perseverance can in time effect a change of attitudes.

At this point the focus shifts from Gong Xue to Zhang Tielin and his complex reactions to his shocked discovery that his beloved is an unwed mother. On the one hand, he springs to Gong Xue’s defense whenever the neighbors treat her like Hester Prynne, yet he’s hurt and angry with her himself--and not a little jealous of the love that she freely expresses for her small son.

Writer-director Bai Chen is notably successful in conveying all the time and circumstance needed by the repairman to arrive at an enlightened perspective, which does not truly occur until he at last learns the seamstress’ full story. Bai Chen also makes it abundantly clear that his heroine’s decision not to hide her son’s existence is an act of great courage.

With his leisurely, gentle manner, Bai Chen is a skilled storyteller with a keen, even poetic visual sense and an ability to draw out the best from his actors. Every time “Under the Bridge” threatens to turn into an all-out tear-jerker, passing references to all that its people have endured quickly ground it in a reality shaped by a painful recent past. So unexpected is a contemporary Chinese film that takes a positive view toward an unwed mother--not to mention its defense of free enterprise--that “Under the Bridge” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes( leaves us wondering what taboo will fall next in the revitalized Chinese cinema.