REVIEWED - SHANGHAI DREAMS/QING HONG: Wang Xiaoshuai's tale of a family during the waning days of Mao's revolution is leisurely and lovingly made, writes Donald Clarke

THE incessant murmurings in the media concerning the continuing economic advance of China suggest this might be a good time to ponder the history of that country's recent shuffle towards capitalism.

Wang Xiaoshuai's hypnotic autobiographical drama offers a fascinating portrait of a family, relocated to the interior during the Cultural Revolution, contemplating a return to the factories of Shanghai in the 1980s. But the film, a worthy successor to the same director's Drifters, is notable more for its sombre, insidious beauty than for any sociological significance.

Filmed among crumbling tenements in oppressively damp weather, Shanghai Dreams begins in the austere manner of a dispatch from the grey heyday of British kitchen-sink drama. Qinghong (Gao Yuanyuan), a shy, intelligent teenager, is consistently frustrated by her conservative father's reluctance to allow her even a modicum of independence. Those few grim pleasures her oppressive locale offers - none less inviting than dancing to Boney M in a stark room more properly suited to the slaughtering of pigs - have to be surreptitiously snatched in the company of her breezier, more dynamic pal, Xiaozhen (Wang Xueyang).

Wang, whose camera, once anchored, rarely deigns to move, manages to locate hopeful spots of colour amid the pervasive gloom: a pair of red shoes given to Qinghong by an aspiring lover; her spotlessly clean sweater; Xiaozhen's powder-blue umbrella.

Sadly, such small visual consolations do not actually presage any great uplift. The last quarter of the picture, throughout which the mechanical throb of the factory sounds like a cracked funeral bell, sees disaster and betrayal visit each of the principal characters. As the rain begins to fall in biblical torrents and hitherto earthbound personalities become vengeful hooded demons, the film, casting off its drab realist personality, takes on the quality of a grand tragedy.

There may be a political allegory buried in the denouement, but the sweep is so overpowering any such lesson may require a second viewing to set in. Impressive stuff.