IRON AND SILK
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Mark Salzman stars in the film based on
his autobiographical book about his two years teaching in
China in the early 1980s. While the film places too strong
an emphasis on his martial arts training, it is also a
valuable film to help understand what is happening in
modern-day China. Rating: low +3 (-4 to +4).
I have visited thirty-two countries other than my own, but none have had such an impact on me as China during my 1982 visit. This was just the tail end of Mao's China. In most of the places we saw everyone still dressed in the Mao suits and caps. Some of the cities I visited had been open to Westerners for only a year and you only had to be non-Chinese to be treated as a celebrity. The Chinese were not shy about their curiosity about Westerners either. In many cities in the north we would have crowds five and six deep around our bus, just to be able to look in the windows. Parents held up youngsters to see into the bus. People still talked very sadly about the horrible disaster that recently had struck their country. It was a man-made disaster called a "cultural revolution." In 1982 this was one China. The China of five years later seemed another China altogether, with Western styles, new fancy hotels, Coca-Cola, and Reeboks. In their words, they were "letting a thousand flowers bloom." Two years later at Tienanmen Square there was yet another China. Truly a country that comprises one quarter of humanity changes little in any but the superficial face it shows to foreigners, but that face to visiting foreigners it makes a big difference and it is a very different China to them.
As something of a coincidence, the 1982 China I saw was also seen by Mark Salzman. He graduated from Yale that year and went to fulfill a dream he had had. He was a martial arts film enthusiast as a teenager and he went to live in China and to try to study martial arts if possible. The ostensible reason for his visit was to teach English at the Hunan Medical College in Changsha, but he also wanted to learn martial arts in the classical manner. After a two-year stay he returned to the United States and wrote a book about his experiences in China, IRON AND SILK. With Shirley Sun, he co-authored a screenplay based on his book. He returned to China with Sun to film the screenplay. This time he went to Hangzhou, which stood in for Changsha in the film. Sun produced and directed; Salzman starred. The day after the film was completed, as VARIETY reports, the Chinese military moved on Tienanmen Square and crushed a student rebellion and a thousand flowers.
The film shuttles back and forth among several subplots which are not entirely independent. We see Mark's relationship to his class and his teaching. He is a teacher teaching teachers English and in turn being taught by them about Chinese culture and the Chinese people. Through one of the members of his class, Mark meets a great and famous martial arts instructor, Teacher Pan (played by Pan Qingfu, a.k.a. Teacher Pan--yes, both Mark and Pan play themselves). Pan is pleased by the interest of the American but at first wants no part of teaching a spoiled foreigner who is unwilling to "eat bitter." A third subplot has Mark attracted to a young woman with a taste for English literature. And a fourth subplot deals with Mark just learning about the ageless culture and the current government.
The stereotypic plot for such a story would have the foreigner and the local Chinese misunderstanding each other and conflicting at first, then learning to like each other. Ironically, that is just the reverse of what happens. In the early part of his visit, Mark's relationships with the Chinese are characterized by friendly cultural curiosity on both sides. The one early ominous note is that the teachers in Mark's class who had earlier learned Russian were ordered not just to learn English, but to forget their Russian. Mark drops this detail gleefully without reflecting how firmly it indicates that the government can vengefully turn against a foreign nationality and how powerfully they can order the people to follow suit. Eventually Salzman comes to realize, or at least believe, that the government wants foreigners to believe that the country is open to new ideas, but at the same time it is determined to force the people to reject change. There is almost no mention of political differences until well into the film when suddenly Mark discovers that some of his closest friends are under heavy censure for showing too much interest in Western ways.
Most of what is wrong with IRON AND SILK is in the iron part of the film: the martial arts. Salzman's martial arts accomplishments are impressive without being all that interesting. Entirely too much screen time is spent on showing uninteresting martial arts demonstrations and with characters, particularly Salzman himself, showing off for the camera. Also Salzman uses a cutesy touch--scenes from old martial arts movies intercut in the film to show what he is thinking. A similar touch is used on a cable situation comedy currently, but it undercuts the atmosphere of the otherwise serious film.
Salzman makes a surprising and disturbing mistake in the script when he tells his girlfriend that he wanted to learn Chinese so he would be able to speak to a quarter of the world. In fact, he speaks Mandarin and nowhere near all people who speak a dialect of Chinese speak Mandarin. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as are English and German. Written Chinese is a different matter, I believe. There is basically only one written Chinese language and that all dialects share, but there are several spoken dialects that might as well be different languages.
I did find that the film reminded me much of my trip. I did not visit Changsha, but I did visit Hangzhou and the film very nicely captured the feel of that beautiful city. The highest compliment I can pay IRON AND SILK is that not only did my visit help me to understand the film, the film helped me to understand better my visit. In spite of excessive martial arts sequences this is the best film I have seen this year. I give it a low +3 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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