Cross-cultural magic

Watching Ann Hu's (胡安) feature debut Shadow Magic (西洋鏡), one is easily reminded of the film Cinema Paradiso. Like its Italian predecessor, it is a movie that revolves around film in its early days, with hand-powered projectors, enraptured audiences laughing, crying and shouting at the screen in their enjoyment. It was also a time when movie-screening technology was rudimentary and films were interrupted in the middle, or machines caught fire.

But, Shadow Magic is also a story about a young man's dual dilemma, torn by the opposing forces of Western novelty and Chinese tradition and facing a choice between his passion for love and his father's urge that he marry a rich widow to improve the family's fortunes. It's a film with a heavy East-meets-West emphasis -- set as it is in the waning days of the Qing empire -- and benefits hugely from Hu's background as a Chinese-American.

The plot of Shadow Magic is based loosely on the life of Chinese filmmaking pioneer Liu Jinglun (劉京倫) and his production of the first silent film in China in 1902. Jared Harris (Happiness, I Shot Andy Warhol, Smoke) plays a threadbare entrepreneur, Raymond Wallace, who is in China hoping to sell the West's latest invention -- moving pictures. Wallace's show, called "Shadow Magic," enjoys little success until he meets Liu, a young photographer played by Xia Yu (夏雨).

Liu, a photographer at a Beijing photography shop, is fascinated by the much-maligned and "useless" foreign "gadgetry" of photos and film. His interests eventually connect him with Wallace, and he begins to help with the "Shadow Magic" show.

But Chinese society at the time felt intense animosity toward foreigners and was deeply suspicious of all elements of Western culture. Liu is then forced to hide his friendship with Raymond from his employer and his father. His desire to learn the "foreigner's tricks" also jeopardizes his relationship with Ling, the woman he loves, who is the daughter of a man named Lord Tan. Tan happens to be China's most celebrated Chinese opera star at that time, and he unsurprisingly was contemptuous of movies in comparison with thousand-year-old Chinese performance art.

The most intriguing parts of the film deal with the collision of these two cultures and the ultimate compromises reached between the two. With humor and detail, Hu brings out people's apprehensive contact with film by showing audiences' astonished faces when they see images projected on a screen, the openly voiced suspicion and afterward the excited chatter and visible enjoyment. Even the Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), featured in a climactic scene, is won over: "The foreigners indeed excel at this. They know how to have fun."

Using magic as a metaphor, Hu hints at the value of film as a possible bridge between cultures. Liu has to convince his neighbors not to worry. "The black box can make you into a film, and you'll look the same in the film even 100 years later." At the end of the movie, one of Liu's neighbors who has become an avid movie fan, says: "even if the machine blows up again, I'll still go to the movies."

And don't forget Shadow Magic also features a love story, as Liu takes the bold step to pursue Ling in a "Western way" as taught by Wallace. Liu and Ling -- played by rising starlet Xing Yufei (邢宇飛) -- indulge in slight flirtation when Ling asks Liu to take her photo.