BUDDHA MOUNTAIN (China, 2010)
Directed by: Li Yu
Starring: Sylvia Chang, Fan Bingbing, Wilson Chen, Fei Long

Every lost weekend is exactly the same for Nan Feng, Ding Bo, and Soap: sleep all day, party all night, and rock the mic with your pet monkey.  This hipster trio try to strike a hard-ass pose, but their bravado is disintegrating under the weight of their own private traumas.  Looking for escape, they answer a housing ad placed by prickly Peking Opera singer Chang (old school cinema icon, Sylvia Chang), and a glorious cross-generational traffic accident is set into motion that will lead them all to deliverance on BUDDHA MOUNTAIN.

From the moment Chang orders “no boy/girl mixing” after hours, the kids are at odds with their old-fashioned landlady - they can’t stand her morning opera practice, and they’d rather eat KFC than home cooking.  But the apartment is a seething mess of hidden traumas and silent heartbreak.  Nan Feng swallows her love for Ding Bo, everybody’s got bad parents, and in the darkened garage, the shellshocked Chang sits in the smashed-up car that serves as a gruesome memorial for her shattered past.  Yet crisis breeds the unlikeliest of surrogate families, and Chang and her new boarders soon find ecstatic, yet serene, unity together.

The latest razor sharp dissection of modern Chinese life from Li Yu (who directed the now-banned LOST IN BEIJING), BUDDHA MOUNTAIN is a survival guide for damaged souls living in 21st century China.  Playing Nan Feng, hot young actress Fan Binging (she also appears in SHAOLIN) is a holy terror who’ll smash a beer bottle over her head then French kiss your girlfriend as the blood runs down her scalp.  Sylvia Chang has directed, written and starred in major hits from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China since 1971 and here, under the direction of Li Yu, one of China’s only female directors, she turns in a performance that’s all steely, white-knuckled grace. 

“Nothing is easy in such a big world,” one of Li’s characters says. “Who cares about us?” 

BUDDHA MOUNTAIN offers its own answer to that question. Sometimes all your life needs is a few unexpected friends and a little body work in the existential auto shop.