China Blue, a Film for the Shopaholic

Squeezed into cellophane and shining ruby red, a Carrefour steak seems such innocent, wholesome food, like fruit that dropped off a beef tree. Were you to witness the grotesque transformation from Holstein to hunk of meat, it would be years before you could even face a hamburger again, and you’d be quivering worse than your last bowl of tofu.

So you owe it to yourself to witness what goes down at the innumerable Dante-esque factories churning out all that cute, cheap crap so indispensable to modern life. No honest slaughter here, more attenuated murder of the spirit, 150 million young bumpkins reduced to obsolete machinery. So China Blue isn’t for airheads who only care when the horse dies during the big battle. But like Dr. Martin Luther (the) King said, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and a conscientious stupidity.”

A flicker of hope, too, for those perceptive enough to be truly moved by the eternal hopelessness of the poor revealed in China Blue. It was made in 2005, when China anticipated its global dominance with the smug assurance of a new capo regime at his predecessor’s funeral. Since then, Zhongnanhai has been poisoning its slave labor pool with all sorts of commie-sounding laws about minimum wage and overtime. Spikes in rice and soy prices are giving those unschooled country kids reason to stay on the farm. After paying their mistresses, factory bosses from Shekou to Shenyang now don’t even have enough left over for XO at the KTV. Good. May we live to see Walmart become a boutique for the rich, always high prices.

Wearing jeans used to mean your butt was more comfortable on a horse or motorcycle than on a parlor couch. China Blue shows us the subtle elitism of cheap denim. A Cinéma Vérité approach makes this real-life tragedy much more believable than Sally Struthers histrionics ever could. The heroine Jasmine and her fellow wage-slaves already know enough sorrow on the plantation: merciless overseers, foul dorms, six cents an hour minus food and hot water, all the tribulations the semi-educated shopper has heard about and managed to rationalize [it's not like we're talking about animal cruelty here].

But we’ve got a story in China Blue. Ol’ Boss-man Lam has been withholding the $50-a-month pay. Seems he needs it to gas up his Mercedes and hie to the seafood palace, where he wines and dines a western jean-merchant. He gets the big order by promising an impossible deadline. Lam is confident he can deliver: he’ll just turn up the hours and crack the whip a little harder – the girls were getting soft anyway. With clothes pegs pinching their eyes to stay awake, the girls do daily twenty hour marathons. When Lam still holds out on pay, he has the makings of a revolution on his hands.

The glorious western corpocrats who buy and resell the goods don’t escape having their rocks overturned, either. Somehow, director Micha Peled manages to sit in on the fateful deal, in which a British buyer wrangles Lam into accepting a price so low the difference will have to come out of the workers’ pockets.

Ultimately, it’s the focus on Jasmine, sacrificing precious rest-time to keep a diary featuring a superhero alter-ego, that forces all but the most callous to rethink the cost of their consumer lifestyles. Irrepressible, even when fined for laughing, she makes a much more sympathetic hero than one less young and innocent, who would quickly die inside. That Jasmine and her ilk would rather dance than despair is the most persuasive argument against cheap clothes of all.

Related posts:

1. Film Review: Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
2. Film review: Shanghai Gesture
3. Film review: The World of Suzy Wong
4. Film Review: Fearless
5. Film Review: Infernal Affairs

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