"Up the Yangtze": A eulogy for a dammed river

Like the rest of the world, China is coming to terms with enormous change. In "Up the Yangtze," the specific national trauma happens to be the damming of the Yangtze River, which leads to the obliteration of a significant portion of the country's landscapes, and the relocation of many citizens who are forced to abandon their homes.

"Now people speak of the river in the past tense," says Yung Chang, the film's gifted young narrator and writer-director, who grew up as a member of the only Chinese family in a small Canadian town.

Early on, he developed an interest in Chinese culture that eventually took him and his parents to China, where he shot this mournful documentary about the massive flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam. For an American project of comparable scope, imagine the Grand Canyon turned into a lake.

Chang feels that "Up the Yangtze," which is based on his experiences on the river between 2002 and 2006, could just as easily have been a fiction film.

Indeed, when he focuses on a "farewell cruise" in which Chinese tourist-ship workers are Americanized with names like Cindy and Jerry, the movie suggests the precision of fiction. Chang claims to have been inspired by "Heart of Darkness" as well as such class-conscious stories as "Gosford Park" and "Upstairs Downstairs."

At other times, especially when villages turn into ghost towns and a ship manager confronts a greedy cruise worker — in a jolting scene that doesn't look staged — the movie becomes a document of a one-time-only event. There is no computer-enhanced imagery of devastation. Nor is there an obvious buildup to the manager's boot-camp behavior.

In the early 1960s, director Elia Kazan took a fictional approach to the subject in one of his more underrated movies: "Wild River," featuring Jo Van Fleet as a stubborn woman who refuses to face the inevitable and leave her home, which is soon to be flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

"Up the Yangtze" sometimes achieves the urgency of that film, especially during interviews with angry citizens (China, one of them says, "is too hard for common people") and during a time-lapse sequence that shows the floodwaters covering trees, rocks, hills and houses. But the tone is finally one of wistful resignation.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com