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Action at the speed of a mountain

Young women are bought and sold in China as brides. There are plenty of evil characters in a life such as this. Families sell their own daughters for a little bit of cash. Other families buy them for their sons in rural areas, primarily to create more children that can then work in the fields. Boys are much preferred and girls are only good for creating more boys. While sex trade is illegal in China, local village councils don't pay attention and the higher authorities treat it as a family matter rather than as criminal.

" Blind Mountain" follows one young woman, Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu), who experiences this nightmarish scenario. Set in the early 1990's, she is a recent college graduate who is having trouble finding employment.  She is befriended by another young girl and an older gentleman, to work in a rural area of China. Bai Xuemei is very happy to have finally landed a good job so that she can help her family pay for her brother's education. Instead, she is kidnapped, drugged and sold as a bride to a sadistic, homely villager, far from the city life in which she has been raised.

Once there she is truly trapped. In addition to a brutal husband and immediate family, the entire village fiercely enforces this way of life. In and around her village, Bai Xuemei meets other young women who have suffered the same fate and they have all been beaten into submission and have accepted their fate. She makes multiple escape attempts but is captured every time, once making it as far as into town and onto a bus heading back to the world she came from. To buy a ticket she has had to sell her body to another villager because none of these women are ever allowed to have any money, for fear they might have the means to escape. After suffering repeated rapes by her husband, selling herself is no longer as personally objectionable as it was earlier in her life.

All of the actors in " Blind Mountain" are untrained except for Huang Lu. This helps add a raw vitality but it also undermines the film at the same time. Some of the performances are passable but her husband never seems believable. Writer/Director Yang Li achieves a level of grit by using mostly non-actors but it also never feels quite right. What we are left with is a profoundly disturbing tale that never affects us all that much. Despite her horrible situation, we are never more than detached observers - never personally invested in her plight.

" Blind Mountain" is important because of its topic and because the government of China felt it necessary to edit the film multiple times before it would be allowed to see the light of day. Someday we might get to see an uncut version and that would probably be a powerhouse. Unfortunately, we are left with what the Chinese government will allow us to see. Considering what they have left in, one can only imagine what they have cut out.