What Do The Critics Say
"It’s a typical rags to riches story, with some captivating dance sequences, and some rather obvious suspense, thrown in. Quibbles aside, there’s a lot to enjoy in the film; it’s very efficiently made, and though never totally inspiring, it’s eminently watchable. It's very interesting and the ending is wonderful."
David Stratton ABC AT THE MOVIES
"Like Nureyev and Baryshnikov, Li Cunxin was a ballet dancer too talented to be hidden from the eyes of the West, and too canny not to defect at the earliest opportunity. Mao's Last Dancer's two hours go by in a flash, and the ballet sequences choreographed by Graeme Murphy are an added visual treat in a film with an embarrassment of riches. Bruce Beresford has delivered one of his best movies."
Nick Dent TIME OUT SYDNEY
"Well presented and brimming over with reverence, Beresford's tribute to an ex-Communist Billy Elliot sidesteps hard hits for a solid performance. Bruce Beresford’s first Australian co-production in a decade pays under-stated tribute to Cunxin."
Hilton Thomas EMPIRE MAGAZINE
"Beresford excels at bringing all the elements together in this splendid and ambitious film that presses all our emotional buttons. Christopher Gordon's rousing score, Peter James' wonderful cinematography and Harold Pinter's immaculate production design all add greatly as we become immersed in Li's inspiring story."
Louise Keller URBAN CINEFILE
"Beresford is a traditional, no-frills filmmaker, and he succeeds in fashioning a moving memoir into a thrilling movie. Truth is, ballet has the capacity to kill cinema stone dead, yet he teases out the emotional resonance that keeps the story well and truly alive. Working from Jan Sardi's pacy adaptation of Li Cunxin's memoirs, and energised by Peter James' gripping cinematography, Mao's Last Dancer is the consummate crowd-pleaser."
Colin Fraser FILMINK
"Christopher Gordon's terrific, multi-coloured and delightful score with its light but sure touch and Graeme Murphy's stunning choreography add considerably to the film's pleasures. Herbert Pinter's design is so good it's invisible and Peter James excels himself with cinematography that subtly adjusts as we shift from one place and time to another."
Andrew L Urban URBAN CINEFILE
"The dancing is sublime. Graham Murphy's choreography is wonderful. Chi Cao, his dancing is just, sort of like, jaw dropping. It makes me wish I'd gone to more ballets than lousy movies over the last few years, to tell you the truth. I cried buckets twice. I think it's got such a wonderful dramatic arc, this film. I think the performances are lovely."
Margaret Pomeranz ABC AT THE MOVIES
"The choreography is beautiful and the contrasting dance styles do a good job of communicating some of the ideological differences between communist China and the free-market United States."
Paul Stock OUR BRISBANE
"Don't see Mao's Last Dancer if you want a perfectly structured film. See it if you want to experience a truly amazing story."
Giles Hardie SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
"This is a film that will hugely entertain. Its philosophical and cultural underpinnings provide edifying moral messages, and the movie is a welcome return of Bruce Beresford to Australian cinema. The film, which follows the book reasonably closely, portrays the story of Li at three levels."
CATH NEWS AUSTRALIA
"There are many graceful touches in Mao's Last Dancer, Bruce Beresford's stirring, uplifting adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet star who defected to the West in 1981 while on a fellowship with the Houston Ballet. Beresford does make absolutely sure the big themes central to Cunxin's journey ring out loudly enough to strike those heart strings at which he is so clearly and shamelessly taking aim." Jim Schembri THE AGE
The Inside Story
The story began for 1996 award winning Producer Jane Scott ("Shine") five years ago when she read the book of "Mao’s Last Dancer", Li Cunxin’s best-selling autobiography. The book stayed on the Australian top 10 Bestseller List for over one and a half years and it is in the 32nd printing. It has been published and sold in over twenty countries. It won the Book of the Year Award in Australia, the Christopher Award in America and was short-listed for the National Biography Award. The book had been recommended to Jan Sardi ("Halifax f.p: Lies of the Mind") by a friend and he was intrigued enough by the story that he mentioned it to Scott. Sardi and Scott had successfully collaborated on two films, the Academy Award-winning "Shine" (directed by Scott Hicks) and, more recently, "Love’s Brother" (starring Giovanni Ribisi). "We each bought a copy and raced each other to finish it. Even before were half way through we knew that it was a film that we wanted to make," 1996 Australian Film Institute Award winner Sardi ("Shine") says. "It immediately came across as an ideal book to be made into a film, although I must say that I believe that books don’t necessarily make good films due to their literary quality. But in the case of Mao’s Last Dancer, Li had written a wonderful book: beautifully," says Scott, "and of course his story is riveting. Jan Sardi was the ideal writer of this screenplay because he has a great way of simplifying the writing into a visual style or a style that a director can use as the background for his own vision and he doesn’t let the literary quality get in the way of it. Bruce Beresford is an ideal director of this film for much the same reason in that he is a great interpreter of storytelling." For four time Australian Film Institute Award winner Bruce Beresford (1997, '80 & '86), the script was irresistible: "You could describe it as another rags to riches story and there’s been lots of them in the history of movies. But, in this case, the rags were somewhat more extreme because Li Cunxin came from a background of incredible deprivation in a totalitarian country and to try and get out of that background and achieve world fame as a dancer is monstrously difficult, but he achieved it against the most staggering odds." The first challenge for Sardi in adapting the book of "Mao’s Last Dancer" was to take a story that spans so many years and so much diversity: from Li Cunxin’s rural Chinese peasant childhood to performing before the US Vice President in America, and creating an emotionally satisfying cinematic journey. "One of the first instincts I had for telling the story was to begin on the day that Li is plucked out of his village classroom to go to Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy" says Sardi ("The Notebook"). "The idea of him being taken away from home, from his family and those he loves and being sent on an epic journey. And then of course I wanted to bring him home. There’s so much wonderful material in the book and what I set out to do was to follow the emotional line of Li’s story in a way that would make it feel to the audience that they’ve been on that journey with him. It’s not easy to do in two hours, to distil a life in that way, but that’s what you have to do. It’s always all about emotion." Italian-born, Australian-raised Sardi, who memorably wrote the screenplay of "Shine" based on the life story of pianist David Helfgott, says he feels, in telling a real story about someone’s life “this great burden of responsibility to get it right. You have to take certain liberties in terms of combining characters and compressing time because there is no way you can condense someone’s life into two hours without doing that, or even twenty hours.
"So the aim is to try to find a cinematic and poetic style of telling the story which takes an audience emotionally on that journey to a place and brings them back feeling transformed." The second great challenge in bringing "Mao’s Last Dancer" to the screen was in casting the character of Li Cunxin. "When I first read the script was I thought we’d never find anyone to play Li," says Beresford ("Puberty Blues"). "Because obviously we had to have a first class ballet dancer: indeed, not just first class, but superlatively good; he had to be young and handsome and he had to be able to act a very complicated role in two languages, Mandarin and English. And I thought, does such a person exist? But, we hunted around and we found Chi Cao with the Birmingham Royal Ballet." In the end, three actors were cast as Li: Chi Cao plays Li as an adult; Chengwu Guo plays Li as a teenager, and Huang Wen Bin plays Li as a boy. "Bruce said to me early on, 'Of course if we don’t have those actors/dancers, we won’t have a film.' So it was pretty important to be able to find just the right people in the world and I suppose, strangely, those people have come to us one way or another. It was obvious that Chi Cao was a fabulous opportunity for us and indeed for him I think to play this extraordinary character in the film. We found the little boy, Huang Wen Bin, in China and we also had the great opportunity of meeting Chengwu Guo, who is a Chinese dancer dancing with the Australian Ballet in Melbourne. We saw Chengwu dancing at his graduation from the Australian Ballet School, we auditioned him and he was fantastic as the middle Li," Scott ("Crocodile Dundee") explained. "It was always going to be difficult to get the dancers released for the film and I worried a bit about this but actually we’ve had the most wonderful assistance from each ballet company. First of all the Australian Ballet: most generous; Artistic Director David McAllister has been so keen that he made available any dancer if they wanted to be in the film and if we had chosen them. So that’s been fantastic. And also there’s part of the Australian Ballet’s production of "Swan Lake" in the film which was wonderful to be able to show. From the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Hong Kong Ballet too we’ve had great help and so really none of it was as difficult as I thought it would be." The third great challenge for the production was filming in China. Scott was introduced to experienced Chinese producer Geng Ling and invited her to join "Mao’s Last Dancer" as Co-producer. "To shoot in China I knew that we would have to have a Chinese co-producer and I really needed to have a co-producer whom I respected and who understood the project. Geng Ling was absolutely the ideal person to work with me on the film," Scott says. "I gave her the screenplay and she read it and loved it. And I was so fortunate because Geng Ling was able to make a lot of things happen that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, such as the very best choices of key crew and the best locations." A number of significant roles were cast in China as well as hundreds of extras, including young dancers from China. A Chinese crew was appointed, to work in tandem with the international crew from Australia, Mexico, Europe and elsewhere. "We really had some of the most experienced people in China working with us. Our Chinese 1st Assistant Director Zhang Jinzhan (known as 'The General') has worked with directors such as Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige; and our Chinese casting director Li Hai Bin has worked with directors such as Quentin Tarantino," Scott noted. Scott, Beresford, Ling, Herbert Pinter and Peter James travelled across China in search of locations.
"The village that Li Cunxin came from in was a difficult location to find because when we went to where he really grew up, it had now been absorbed by the city of Tsingtao." Beresford ("Double Jeopardy") recalls. "The little houses had all been demolished and everyone had been rehoused in apartment blocks. Then we found a village about one hundred kms or so outside of Beijing in the mountains which was very picturesque. And it too was more or less abandoned but it was exactly what we needed for the film and with a few little additions via the art department, it served for the home village." The art department, headed by 2005 Excellence in Production Design Award winner Herbert Pinter, recreated Li’s childhood home and the village school using traditional Chinese stonework, The village is depicted during the harsh winter, covered with snow, and during spring with cherry blossoms blooming, both effects created by Herbert Pinter’s team. The other major location in China was the Dance Academy in Bejing where Li Cunxin was sent to study and board as a young boy. A disused dance school was found on the outskirts of Bejing and converted into a mini film studio with sets built for the dance classes, dormitory, theatre and communal dining scenes. Casting for Mao’s Last Dancer traversed continents. Chi Cao, who plays the adult Li Cunxin, auditioned for the film in England, where he is based with the Royal Birmingham Ballet. Chi is the son of a dance teacher in Beijing. And while his city childhood was quite different to Li’s rural beginnings, he says he empathises deeply with Li’s story. "There are a lot of similarities with my life and Li’s life, especially in terms of our career. We trained at the same school, the Beijing Dance Academy, and then I left my family at 15 to go to London to join the Royal Ballet School in London. We both went to the West at such a young age without knowing the language and basically had to find out, by ourselves, how things work." Joan Chen, whose starring roles include "The Last Emperor" and "Twin Peaks", grew up in Shanghai but now lives in the US. Joan was cast as Li’s mother. His father is played by acclaimed Chinese actor Wang Shuang Bao ("Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" & "Blind Shaft"). Chen too shares a similar history to Li Cunxin, leaving China as a teenager in order to study in the US. At the time, she was already had a huge profile in China, as a child star. "Li and I left for America at the same time. I could understand his feelings, the feelings of arriving at some wonderful opportunities, as well as the aching nostalgia for a home that you might not ever return to. So, I could relate to his story very, very closely." After several weeks in China, the production moved to Houston USA, and Sydney, Australia. Some of the most challenging sequences to film were those of Li Cunxin performing with the Houston Ballet. "Although we only show short sequences of the ballets on stage, they still had to be set up as an entire ballet. They had to be convincing professional productions," Scott says. "For example, to film Swan Lake, we had to transport the whole production from the Sydney Opera House." "Every film has its own problems and opportunities and the script is the thing that tells you what the film is going to look like. This is a film in three parts: the early years in China, the ballet sequences in the US, and the drama of the Chinese Embassy and the love story. The story, I think, is outstanding and it gives a great opportunity for variation," says FIVE TIME Australian Cinematographers Society and three time AFI awards winning D.O.P, Peter James ("Meet the Parents" & "Driving Miss Daisy").
The Verdict
"There's an intense rawness to this latest Australian production that sits well with both the portrayal of the characters, the period the film is set in and the spirit in which the book was written. Those who have (and there are many) read the story of "Mao's Last Dancer" will have to set aside their preconceived interpretation, or they will spoil the experience of what is (despite some minor flaws) an adaptation that is to be applauded. A wonderfully moving and inspirational experience, that is sure to win over ardent ballet fans as well as non-ballet fans. Based on the best selling novel, "Mao's Last Dancer" is a noteworthy adaptation filmed in China, the U.S.A. and Australia. Highly recommended and, definately one film not to be missed. If you're the 'emotional' type, take plenty of tissues. 4 1/2 STARS."
Synopsis
 Seventeen years after Chairman Mao founded the People's Republic of China, the great cultural revolution, which would run until his death in 1976, started. In 1972, cultural delegates visit a dirt-poor village in Shandong province. They are searching for children who may have the athletic skills to fulfill Madame Mao's vision. It appears their visit is fruitless. None of the children in the villages school appear suitable. Then, just as they are above to leave, the teacher suggests and eleven year old boy. The delegates agree to accept her advice. Leaving his family behind, the boy travels by train to Beijing where he joins the thousands selected for athletic evaluation. He is chosen to attend Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy. The boys name is Li Cunxin. When Ben Stevenson, the artistic director of Houston Ballet conducts a summer school in Beijing, Li Cunxin is chosen to travel to the U.S.A. All goes well for the talented performer, until he falls in love. When an extension of his visa is denied, he chooses to defect.
Who Plays Who?
Chi Cao
Chengwu Guo
Huang Wen Bin
Bruce Greenwood
Amanda Schull
Camilla Vergotis
Aden Young
Steven Heathcote
Madeleine Eastoe
Penne Hackforth-Jones
Ferdinand Hoang
Robin Choi
Kyle MacLachlan
Joan Chen
Shuangbao Wang
Yang Li
Alice Parkinson
Jack Thompson
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Li Cunxin
teenage Li Cunxin
Li the boy
Ben Stevenson
Elizabeth Mackey
Mary McKendry
Dilworth
Bobby Cordner
Lori
Cynthia
Consul Zhang
Embassy Guard
Charles Foster
Niang
Dia
Shi Dao
Alice
US Federal Judge
The Production Team
Director
Screenplay
From the book
Adaptation
Producer
Original Music
Cinematography
Film Editor
Casting
Production Designer
Art Direction
Set Decoration
Costume Design
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Bruce Beresford
Jan Sardi
by Cunxin Li
Jan Sardi
Jane Scott
Christopher Gordon
Peter James
Mark Warner
Nikki Barrett & Sharon Howard-Field
Herbert Pinter
Elaine Kusmishko & Bernardo Trujillo
Kerrie Brown
Anna Borghesi
Run Time 117 minutes
Rated PG [AUST]
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