China is Near

China is Near is not about love, but sex; it's not about ideology, but politics. The proletarians making love at the start of the movie on a hard wooden bench are by the end wallowing in feather-beds. Their socialist consciences are not so much destroyed as dissipated by bourgeois morality, or rather immorality.

Marco Bellochio develops this theme using what may be the most complicated plot since La Ronde. Sexual liaisons develop as rapidly as the political alliances they are set against--Bellochio depicting both as equally passionate and equally insincere.

His own sincerity is tremendous. He shows his Maoist leanings symbolically: the tiny bourgeois Scotch terrior seen playing throughout the film is in the end dwarfed by the powerful German shepherds the Maoists use to break up a Socialist meeting. When we finally see Carlos, it takes no great subtlety to wonder who is leading who. The bourgeois takes inventory of his books, and The History of China is followed by The Hope of Italy.

As the film develops, the workers succumb not through ideological but moral weakness: slogans aside, they hold bourgeois values. At the outset Carlos, cigarette dangling from his proletarian lip, tells his working class lover, "Someday I'll make it big...I want the cake, not just the crumbs." Twenty minutes later we see them both bedfellows of their bourgeois employers.

Labels are all-important. They dominate the political scene like political posters dominate many of Bellochio's shots. Who can resist ideological semantics which produce groups like the New Socialist Left Center Coalition Party?

Hypocritical leftists aren't the only ones ridiculed. The film's most honest character, a 17-year-old, spouts Maoisms while being seduced. The film centers around Vittorio (beautifully played by Glattco Mauri), a rich bourgeois who out of vanity accepts the Socialist nomination for a local office. They want his respectability to hide his own rather comic ineffectuality. Of course all these hypocrisies destroy each other. The radicals take on Vittorio's bourgeoisie, while he remains as impotent in politics as in his own home.

Sharp editing and a mobile, zooming camera carry the fast pace of changing personal and political relationships. This pace is perhaps a bit hectic, especially at the beginning: Bellochio cuts from one liaison to another without letting us figure out ideological or amatory identities. But these are minor confusions that only tumble forward to hit us occasionally, when the rest of the film slows down.

China is Near is a rare film in which art and message peacefully coexist. The hypocrisy of dishonest personal relations; ideology disappearing through compromise; these are tragic themes. But Bellochio handles them lightly, with humor, and the tragedy appears only in the interstices of laughter, gaining in nobility and significance.