the review of "Beijing Bicycle"

When you were young, did you ever own a bicycle and lose it? Or, how would you have felt if you lost your bicycle? Some may say that it is just a bicycle, but some may say that it would be a disaster or a humiliation. The movie, “Beijing Bicycle”, is a story surrounding a bicycle and a city boy and a country boy in Beijing. In the beginning, the two boys seem to be simply opposites of each other, but by the end of the movie, the two teenagers have similar and corresponding aspects. The movie thus states that every one of us has the same difficult and hard life struggles, no matter if one is rich or poor or one is from the city or countryside.

Xiaoshuai Wang, the director, who is very interested in making independent movies to show characteristics of contemporary Chinese society, depicts ordinary lives of people in the capital city, Beijing, focusing on two youths with a bicycle, which symbolizes everything for both protagonists. The city boy, Jian, desires the bicycle as the key to get a girl friend and to be a member of a peer group, and the country boy desperately wants to keep the bicycle as a means of making a living and achieving his dream, since he is an immigrant worker from the countryside to the city. The two teenagers have different motivations to fight over the bicycle and different ways to approach the bicycle with different attitudes—the city boy with active voice and the country boy with passive voice—, but the two characters both think that the bicycle means everything to their survival in society. This is why both of them do not hesitate to fight violently and steal money or the bicycle itself.

I think that the director effectively describes “Chineseness” through the reality of life in Beijing using a bicycle, which is an important transportation of daily life, especially for teenagers, a bicycle rather than a car. The two characters, though urban boy and a rural boy, experience the same fate: they become happy, sad, disappointed, angry, violent, and desperate with the bicycle. Even though, at the end, they finally reconcile with each other and their conflicts over the bicycle, they are not able to keep the bicycle and become happy as they wish because there is another factor in their lives: a group of people who have power and authority in the community. The last gruesome scene gives the audience the idea that even if they finally share their only means of life, the bicycle, peacefully, there are many more troubles and difficulties to growing up and to being mature with their miserably broken bicycle.

In modern society, whether urban or rural, or China or America, we chase after what we value and dream of such as money, fame, honor, and so on. What we chase, however, could be everything or nothing, just like the bicycle. Something we desperately admire that looks like the best could be a fake, just like the “elegant and stylish” girl inside of the neighboring window who the country boy always secretly adores turns out to be a housekeeper. The movie tells the audience that what we have dreamed of or even sometimes what we have not been aware of as we grow up could be just like the bicycle, symbolizing painful sorrow and sadness when we realize the absence of it. And even though we know the hardships and difficulties of life that the last scene conveys in the movie, we will still pursue our own “bicycle”, no matter how hard it is to grow up and to be mature.