Review | Film review: I Am Not Madame Bovary – Fan Bingbing defies petty bureaucracy in dark satire

Political indifference to human rights is examined in Feng Xiaogang’s tale of a village woman’s search for justice in the bureaucracy of mainland China

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Fan Bingbing plays a villager seeking justice in I Am Not Madame Bovary (category IIA, Putonghua), directed by Feng Xiaogang.

Published: 5:04pm, 21 Nov 2016Updated: 3:31pm, 22 Nov 2016

4/5 stars

The trajectory of Feng Xiaogang’s film career looks to have come full circle. Following acclaim for his early satires Big Shot’s Funeral (2001) and Cell Phone (2003), the Chinese director had spent almost a decade making mega-blockbusters before he changed tack again with 2013’s Personal Tailor , a parody of China’s fixation with materialism.

It’s a testament to his increasing clout that Feng has followed that up with I Am Not Madame Bovary, arguably his most adventurous film yet – both aesthetically and politically. The provocation hasn’t gone unnoticed: although it has won prizes at the Toronto and San Sebastian festivals in September, the tragicomedy’s mainland release was abruptly postponed for weeks due to censorship issues.

Beijing officials in a scene from I Am Not Madame Bovary.

A Kafkaesque tale about the Chinese bureaucracy’s indifference to the people’s legal rights, it finds Fan Bingbing in top form as Li Xuelian, a provincial woman who is swindled by her ex-husband and shunned by the courts. Li’s case is complicated in that the couple have faked their divorce to secure a new home, but the man ends up marrying another woman and even sullies Li’s name with claims of infidelity.

Adapted by Liu Zhenyun from his own 2012 novel, I Did Not Kill My Husband, the dark social satire follows Li as she spends the next 10 years petitioning various levels of government, often concluding with a trip to crash the annual national congress in Beijing. Dry humour permeates the story, which sees embarrassed officials go from turning Li away to clumsily muffling her to save their jobs.

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