The film Beijing Bicycle is about a man from the rural country coming into the city and finding a job as a bicycle courier, he loses the bike that he finally paid off and gets fired for losing track of the whole day and not delivering his important package. Insists on finding the bike, he goes on the search for it throughout the whole city where it is eventually tracked down to a kid and steals it back. This goes on back and forth until they come to a compromise, but a climatic ending ensues when a third party comes into the picture and destroy both of their dreams.
I found this movie very provoking, touching on subject of modern china, where in the case of the rural migrant, his livelihood depended on the bicycle, while for the kid that took it, it is a vanity item that is a must have in order to be cool and get the girl. Such a basic item having such different meaning to each of these individual. The extraordinary step each one takes to get the bike, from roaming the streets for days looking at each and every one of the millions of bikes out there, to the stealing of the parents money that was meant for the daughter's tuition, shows how desperate each member of the society is willing to go through to survive in this big city in their own way.
It highlights the plight of migrants and their desires to climb up the ladder of modern china, one minute brushing their teeth with their finger in the streets, the next, spying on a girl in a high rise apartment that is trying on different dresses, who turns out to be another peasant migrant working as a maid, trying out her employer's dresses behind her back.
The ignorant stubbornness is show here again, much like the character in `Not One Less', where they refuse to give up, but at the same time, don't know what actions to take. So what they end up doing is not progressing forward or backward, basically in a standstill. It must be a rural type of characteristics.
Even the ending signifies how the modern world provides inequities, no matter how much you try, with the kid's girlfriend being wooed away by another biker who knows how to perform greater tricks, the kid, being a city kid, does not take the ignorant stubbornness approach, instead goes for the ill-thought confrontational path, only to have revenge taken upon him and the rural migrant by the other biker and his bully gang, resulting in them being beaten up and the bike, which the two have come to share, be destroyed. Both of their dreams shattered and only the cronies who had it in the first place wins at the end.
I found this movie very provoking, touching on subject of modern china, where in the case of the rural migrant, his livelihood depended on the bicycle, while for the kid that took it, it is a vanity item that is a must have in order to be cool and get the girl. Such a basic item having such different meaning to each of these individual. The extraordinary step each one takes to get the bike, from roaming the streets for days looking at each and every one of the millions of bikes out there, to the stealing of the parents money that was meant for the daughter's tuition, shows how desperate each member of the society is willing to go through to survive in this big city in their own way.
It highlights the plight of migrants and their desires to climb up the ladder of modern china, one minute brushing their teeth with their finger in the streets, the next, spying on a girl in a high rise apartment that is trying on different dresses, who turns out to be another peasant migrant working as a maid, trying out her employer's dresses behind her back.
The ignorant stubbornness is show here again, much like the character in `Not One Less', where they refuse to give up, but at the same time, don't know what actions to take. So what they end up doing is not progressing forward or backward, basically in a standstill. It must be a rural type of characteristics.
Even the ending signifies how the modern world provides inequities, no matter how much you try, with the kid's girlfriend being wooed away by another biker who knows how to perform greater tricks, the kid, being a city kid, does not take the ignorant stubbornness approach, instead goes for the ill-thought confrontational path, only to have revenge taken upon him and the rural migrant by the other biker and his bully gang, resulting in them being beaten up and the bike, which the two have come to share, be destroyed. Both of their dreams shattered and only the cronies who had it in the first place wins at the end.