MOVIE REVIEW : ‘TEAHOUSE’: A HALF-CENTURY OF CHINA

In Xie Tian’s “Teahouse” (at the Grande 4-Plex in the Sheraton Grande downtown), a Peking restaurant symbolizes China and its fate between the Boxer Rebellion and the communist revolution of 1949.

Although based on a novel (by Lao She), “Teahouse” seems more like a filmed play with its single key setting, sometimes stagy acting and three-act structure. Yet for all its theatricality (and occasionally wearying 124 minutes), it’s worth the effort and, at its finish, deeply affecting.

“Teahouse” defies Aristotle’s credo that in drama you shouldn’t take a good man from bad to worse, but its downward course is mitigated by a shrewd sense of humor. There’s no tragic flaw in Wang (Yu Shizhi), the hard-working, diplomatic manager of the quaint, airy teahouse with its fragile fretwork decor. The flaw is rather in Chinese society itself.

In 1898, when the film opens, we’re shown a China menaced within by the decadent, crumbling Qing Dynasty and from without by foreign intervention. It is a time of great inequities, when a poor peasant is forced to sell his adolescent daughter to the Empress’ eunuch (Tong Chaw, who gleefully makes him a shrill old tyrant) and when few Chinese have any compassion for their fellows. Yet for the proprietor of the teahouse, it turns out to be the best of times: His establishment is an elegant hub of activity, clearly a key center in the life of the city.

By 1918, however, in the era of the warlords’ reign of terror, the teahouse is in reduced circumstances. Wang is now clearly an Everyman, struggling to survive, drained by extortion by the warlord’s police.

By the end of World War II he is in his 70s, and his now thoroughly shabby establishment is more menaced than ever by agents of the Nationalist government.

Over the years, Wang’s customers and their descendants represent a cross section of humanity. The pimp (Ying Ruocheng) who brokered the sale of the peasant girl to the eunuch has a flashily dressed son who, in the aftermath of World War II, dreams of gaining control of all prostitution in Peking. And there are the kinds of people who frequent the teahouse, although by the late ‘40s they are overcome by futility.

The film’s final sequence is worth all the considerable verbosity that precedes it. Wang, driven to despair, is joined by two old friends who, in assessing the disintegration of all they strived for, decide to celebrate their own funerals.

“Teahouse” offers the pleasure of all movies that span a great length of time in utilizing the medium’s special capacities for expressing a sense of life being lived before our eyes. Peng Xiuwen contributed the film’s spare, discreet score. Lamentably, the art direction credit has not been translated, for the teahouse itself is the film’s true star--the changes it undergoes over half a century are intrinsically revealing. The latest in the Grande’s New Films From China series, “Teahouse” (Times-rated: Mature) is provocative in its forthright communist view of China’s history in the first half of the 20th Century.