It's hard to place Gong Li's cultural affiliations these days. Once the best known face of mainland cinema (she scooped the best actress title at the 1992 Venice Film Festival for The Story of Qiu Ju, becoming the first mainlander to win an international screen acting award), the 44-year-old is now a Singapore citizen courtesy of her 14-year marriage to businessman Ooi Hoe Soeng. And in the past five years, she has worked on more American than Chinese films.
'I come back to China very often as I still have family here,' says Gong, who grew up in the city of Shenyang before enrolling at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing when she was 19. 'Even when I return I just visit my mother and don't spend too much time in, say, Beijing. The rest of the time I am just roaming the world. I don't really stay in one fixed place.'
This nomadic life and the sense of detachment it brings may explain her candid observations about mainland cinema and society. Her views are out of sync with the establishment's self-congratulatory views of China's swift rise as an economic powerhouse.
'China is making leaps in development and people are understandably very excited about it,' Gong says on the telephone from Beijing, where she has just finished filming the Paramount-financed Chinese remake of the Helen Hunt-Mel Gibson romantic comedy What Women Want.
But in terms of spiritual and cultural progress, she says, the mainland reveals its flaws - a situation highlighted by the state of its cinema today.
'A lot of people see how films are bringing in good and quick money at the box office and decide, 'Let's get into that,'' she says. 'Many producers these days have never even touched filmmaking at all... so now you have people selling seafood or in real-estate producing films, which they only see as a money-making machine.'
