Starring: Liu Ye, Chow Yun-fat, Feng Yuanzheng, Jiang Jiayi
Director: Han Sanping, Huang Jianxin
Category: IIA (Putonghua)
Living up to its raison d'?tre as a film celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Beginning of the Great Revival overflows with re-enactments of the rapturous political rallies, heady student demonstrations and clandestine meetings that led to the birth of what is now the world's biggest Marxist-Leninist political organisation in the world.
The party, ironically, is now presiding over what is effectively the world's biggest capitalistic free-for-all today.
There is a scene which, perhaps inadvertently, spells out this paradox: fleeing from the police busting a party meeting, Dutch communist and Comintern representative Henk Sneevliet jumps out of a window and lands in a back street marked, in the distance, by a building with a large sign bearing the name of the Bank of China.
A valediction of the talk about proletarian revolution one moment and an unabashed product placement for a financial institution the next - this clash of ideologies aptly shows why Revival is such a confusing beast.
Directed by China Film Group chairman Han Sanping and veteran filmmaker Huang Jianxin, Revival boasts of being a sincere 'tribute' to the party but resorts to the casting stunt of cramming more than 100 well-known actors into its two-hour screen time.