Weak at both ends. No honor, no integrity, no dignity and stands for nothing. And I mean at both ends. I recommend people watch this to see what Chinese men are really like. It could be based on a true story (if it is not already)

Unleashed on the unsuspecting English speaking world under the title "Lost in Beijing", this is a truly abysmal film. I really hated it. No, I didn't just hate. I utterly despised it. This is the first film that I have seen in Mandarin and the first entirely in a non-European language so that was interesting, which is certainly a great deal more than can be said for the film itself. The film's co-writer and director Li Yu is one of the few women to perform either function in the Chinese film industry. That's quite impressive. However, I would have been significantly more impressed with that accomplishment if she had any talent. I'm a big believer in assigning blame where blame is due so I should say that Fang Li was the other person responsible - and I use that word deliberately - for this blight on cinema. The "script" is absolutely appalling and not one moment of it comes close to resembling reality.The numerous sex scenes and its pronounced anti-government tone ran afoul of the Chinese censors which led to the film being banned in its native country, albeit after it had already been released in a heavily edited fashion. I'm very much against banning films or any other work in principle but I could have lived with having never seen this film. I found parts of it very offensive, not the aforementioned sex scenes but the often incredibly tasteless treatment of the subject matter. Other parts of it seemed like they had been written by a 15-year-old boy who had seen one too many pornos. If cinema were food, this film would be food poisoning. I assume that the Mandarin dialogue was translated accurately, even if it wasn't transcribed accurately since the person who wrote the English subtitles had clearly never heard of a full stop. The dialogue was pathetic but I would not be surprised if it gained something in translation. I would certainly not be averse to watching another film in Mandarin. This film showed me that making absolutely dreadful films is not the soul purview of the English speaking world. That's something, I suppose.The film stars Fan Bingbing in a mediocre but...well, no mediocre performance as Liu Pingguo, a young woman from a poor province who has migrated to Beijing with her idiot husband An Kun, played badly by Tong Dawei. She works as a foot masseuse at the massage parlour Golden Basin. One night after a party, she is raped by her boss Lin Dong, played in a rather good performance by Tony Leung Ka-fai. By an astonishing coincidence, at that exact moment, An Kun just so happens to be washing that exact window and witnesses the rape. That night, he has sex with Pingguo while saying, "Did he ¤¤¤¤ you like this?" Irrespective of how it was intended, it came across as marital rape. An Kun then decides to blackmail Lin Dong for 20,000 yuan. He later visits the rapist's wife Wang Lei, played by Elaine Jin in the film's best performance, and she suggests that they have sex to even the score. She takes the fact that her husband is a rapist in her stride, expressing no shock or sympathy for his victim. The plot, such as it is, is a powerful repellent against logic, common sense and common decency.This unconvincing and sordid melodrama gets even more complicated when Pingguo learns that she is pregnant and that either Lin Dong or An Kun could be the father. Given that Wang Lei is infertile, the two couples come to an arrangement: Lin Dong will give Pingguo and An Kun 100,000 yuan if the baby is his whereas they will receive nothing if the baby is An Kun's. This part of the film devolves into what I assume was intended to be funny. This part of the film was basically a black comedy involving a rapist, his victim and their respective spouses who are having an affair to make up for the rape. Classy. As it turns out, An Kun is the father but he bribes the doctor into falsifying the blood test results so that Lin Dong thinks that the child is his. Pingguo and An Kun move in with Lin Dong and An Kun with Pingguo pretending to be her son's nanny. In an entirely unbelievable development, Pingguo becomes quite fond of Lin Dong. Eventually, he discovers that he is not the child's father and he breaks down crying while sad music plays in the background. Boo bloody hoo. It boggles the mind that this scene, the worst of a very bad bunch, was included. I was infuriated, disgusted and offended that I or anyone else was expected to feel sympathy for a rapist because the woman that he raped had a child that wasn't his. It's contemptible. Even thinking about the scene makes my skin crawl.Overall, I was not a fan of this film. If this does not turn out to be my least favourite film of 2016, I may give up on films altogether. Actually, I may give up on humanity altogether, move into the mountains and spend the rest of my hopefully very long life communing with nature. I only finished watching it because I made myself a promise that I would finish each and every film no matter what and there was certainly a lot of "what" on this occasion. Or maybe it was because I practiced self- flagellation in a previous life. As I was loaned a copy of the film on DVD, I didn't have to pay a cent for it but I still feel like asking for my money back. I would rather have dysentery than watch this again.

China's weird. Didn't we just learn from the Olympic Committee that there's billions of people living there? I think we did. Why then is this one of only a few films I can think of, off the top of my head, coming from there that has any semblance of lived-life-now? Lived life now under peculiar circumstances, sure, because it is a movie after all, but still. Everything else seems to be costumed drama kung fu palace historical Mao-sanctioned fantasy crap. I'm talking mainland China here. Taiwan and Hong Kong don't count. Ang Lee doesn't count. All the Chinese filmmakers making films in other parts of the world, and getting them financed and released in other parts of the world, don't count—and there's the rub.Lost in Beijing is banned in China and its filmmakers are banned for two years from making films in China. What kind of nonsensical time-out is that? I mean no disrespect to the Chinese, I just want more of them to fall through the cracks and make films like Lost in Beijing—which is nothing like Farewell My Hero's Kingdom of Flying Yellow Flowers.Fan Bingbing, known in the west as Bingbing Fan, stars in this film as Liu Ping Guo (Ping Guo, the Chinese title, translates literally as "Apple"), a foot massage girl who is raped by her boss (played out-of-this-worldly great by Tony Leung Ka Fai who's been in enough movies that every Chinese citizen could pick a film of his to see without any two people seeing the same film—western audiences may know him as the guy who has sex with Marguerite Duras in The Lover), and the rape is witnessed by her husband, a window washer who just happens to be hanging from a scaffolding washing the windows of the room at the massage parlor where the rape takes place. Foot massage is big business in China so I guess that's why this massage parlor is some kind of skyscraper that needs these scaffolded window washers, but I digress. The husband sees this as an opportunity to milk a little money from the well to do parlor owner. Lost in Beijing turns a critical eye toward the new moneyed urban class set against the rural, immigrant-in-their-own-country, if you will, working class.Bingbing's husband confronts Tony's wife with the rape news and demands money for his pain and suffering, yes, you read that right, his pain and suffering. Tony's wife laughs at him and suggests a better revenge would be for him to have sex with her, and then in a moment of barely noticed brilliance while she's riding him cowgirl puts sunglasses on him so she can't see him looking at her.It turns out Bingbing is pregnant and things get a little more complicated. If you complain when a film uses overly convenient plot devices to move forward you probably won't like this film as much as I do. I'm more concerned with the caliber of the characters. All four of the main performances in Lost in Beijing are magnificent. (Tony's relationship with, and handling of, his over sized wallet/day-planner is hilarious, as is his response of randomly checking the top of his head for bald spots when he's busted for trying to use a mirror to peek at Bingbing in the shower.) The direction is good and the camera-work creative, sometimes a little too creative to the point where I got dizzy a couple times so I'm deducting a point for that. Beijing is the backdrop here, captured in all its beautiful gray and desolate self.

I normally wouldn't waste my time criticizing a useless movie such as this. However, I'm off of work this week, so I have plenty of time to wallow in meaningless trivialities. To start, let me say that I frequently enjoy non-commercial, non-mainstream, non-American cinema. (Feel free to click on my user profile for a supporting filmography.) That said, there are plenty of bad movies that are released in countries outside of the U.S. Trust me, I've been tortured by hundreds of them. "Lost In Beijing" is one particularly bad film.The opening half hour is an impressive, non-stop exhibition of moral degeneracy. This film provides some classic morals that belong on the same level as Kim Ki-duk's "Bad Guy" (2001). 1. women actually enjoy being raped; 2. rape should be glorified, praised, and respected; 3. feel free to rape any woman you like, because while your "doing" her she'll eventually start to like it and reach orgasm; 4. if you're wife gets raped, make sure you blackmail her rapist for lots of money, but if he doesn't pay, just repeatedly bang his slut of a wife as compensation; 5. if you're wife gets raped, be sure to screw and degrade her the next day while playing the role of the rapist, taunting her with lines like, "Did he fu*k you like this?"; 6. if you're husband is a rapist, just accept it; 7. after you personally get raped, befriend your rapist and hang out with him whenever possible.How can anyone in their right mind care about any of these characters? They're nothing more than a bunch of degenerates who not only live their lives in careless ways, but actually revel in their meaninglessness and support each other. Don't misunderstand me though. I'm very capable of enjoying films that depict lifestyles and morals that are contradictory to my own. "Ichi the Killer" (2001) and "Moonlight Whispers" (1999) are very interesting portrayals of sado-masochism. "Strange Circus" (2005) is an exceedingly perverted play on child sexual abuse. "Marriage Is A Crazy Thing" (2002) is a scathing indictment on traditional marriage. Even religiously-based movies like "Running On Karma" (2003) and "Samsara" (2001) have entertained me on occasion. The difference is that those films actually have some interesting psychological content and character development to them, whereas "Lost In Beijing" has virtually none.It's known that people with unorthodox mindsets exist on this planet, but without some kind of character development or psychology behind the acts themselves, you end up with a superficial exposition of despicable behavior. Why, exactly, does Bing Bing eventually befriend and care for her rapist? Why does the wife of a rapist accept his behavior unconditionally? The filmmakers never bothered to tell us. Even the obvious juxtaposition of rich and poor classes was ineptly conceived and in the end served as a mere situational ploy. It all feels too bland and forgettable after the filthy opening half hour subsides. Other reviewers here seem to have confused moral ambiguity with complex characterization. The reason you can't choose which person to root for is because they weren't developed properly. Don't think that this movie has complex characters just because they're not clearly defined. On the contrary, the reason they're not clearly defined is because we know nothing about them or what they're thinking. This is hardly a positive attribute of this movie. On the positive side, the camera-work and acting are quite good, but everything else just gets duller and duller as the film progresses. You can place this alongside trash like "Turning Gate" (2002), "What Time Is It There" (2001), "Irreversible" (2002), and the aforementioned "Bad Guy."