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Director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle) scooped the 2005 Jury Prize at Cannes with this slice of 80s rural China. Shanghai Dreams traces the cracks that appear in the Wu family when daughter Qinghong (Gao Yuanyuan) falls in love with a local boy, threatening her father Zemin's (Yan Anlian) plan that she leave the countryside for prosperity in Shanghai. This is a stark, uncompromising portrait of life in the Chinese hinterland; but with dead slow pace and little drama, it's a laborious watch.

Still, hardcore cinema geeks will revel in the chance to see more of Wang's understated, documentary style. The Wu family are uprooted from their native Shanghai in the 1960s and sent, thanks to Mao's Cultural Revolution, to the rural Guiyang province to build new factories. Now, in 1983, authoritarian father Zemin and his wife Meifin (Tang Yang) dream of returning to the city, but their daughter Qinghong, born and bred in Guiyang, wants to stay.

"RESOLUTE FLATNESS IN TONE"

A conceit, then, with plenty of potential. But what follows is a series of protracted scenes - at the factory, at home, at a village dance - that insist on absolute realism, with no concession to narrative pace. Only Yan Anlian's depiction of a fiery and controlling patriarch lends a little much-needed dramatic tension; elsewhere the resolute flatness in tone makes it difficult to care about Qinghong's secret love for local factory worker Fan Honggen (Li Bin). We're left, then, to drink in Wang's ΓΌber-naturalistic, arkwardly beautiful pictures of this rural Chinese village. A cinematic education no doubt, but poor recompense for the failed promise of Shanghai Dreams.

Shanghai Dreams is released in UK cinemas on Friday 8th September 2006.