Customer Reviews

Stolen Life

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Without spoiling the film, I'd like to add only slightly to Amazon's "Product Description":

Yanni, the main actress in the movie is living with her extended family who sees her as a waste of a person with little to no future. To everyone's surprise she is accepted to a college in Beijing. She goes, life opens up, the wonders of the world are hers to discover. For those who have visited China's Universities, all the sights are there, particularly those incredibly cramped (with sometimes as many as 7 student) dorm rooms. A wonderful and slightly older delivery man sights her, makes his move and they are in love. Soon Yanni finds out she is pregnant. Not surprisingly, while her lover remains committed, we are slowly taken out of the bright dorm rooms and even the streets of this "New China". The couple move to dwellings underground and we begin to wonder what this delivery man's intentions really are.

This is a powerful feminist movie, where you (man or woman, feminist or non-feminist) would be ready to fight for this woman with every ounce of your human flesh. You will also doubt her choices and scream "Idiot!" a few times at her. But in so doing this, you will surely become all the more aware to what is going on in "Communist China" as a young, hyper-materialistic, and socially aware age group is nearing the age where they will begin to enter the political domain.

The movie is well shot as it is noticeably different in scenery, tone, color and pace from the moment Yanni begins school to the moment we realize she is pregnant.

Like the Criterion Collection, First Run Features is a terrific distributor for those film goers who are more independently and internationally aware. Their special features are not quite up to Criterion standards, however for no other reason than no one else chooses to release these films (from The Global Lens Collection and others) I am thankful for their DVDs. Not to forget, as mostly foreign and independent films, they are also reasonably priced.

Zhou Xun is one of the most compelling actresses working today and she grabs you right from the start in this film. She plays a young woman whose parents, intellectuals from the previous generation, have abandoned her for the most part, shuffling her off to live in near poverty with her granny and aunt. Then she's accepted into university, raising her class status momentarily, but falls in love with a truck driver, gets pregnant and her life unravels. There's subtle and deep social commentary embracing this extremely sad tale of family, love, and one woman's struggle to survive in modern China. I was very surprised by the script. It's softly brutal.

The melodramatic allure of "Stolen Life" is off the charts--in America, this might have been a Lifetime movie of the week about a girl who becomes a victim to her own choices. But keeping things at realistic levels, with a minimum of hysterics, I really appreciated this sad tale of young potential unraveling. With a solid lead performance, the film chronicles how an outcast who has a chance at a better life starts sacrificing everything for the love of a man. Slowly, her life is deconstructed and she must face the consequences of what has transpired.

This is a tough film that retains a nice realistic balance through its actors. Well made and entertaining, in spite of its downbeat story--the film exceeds in making you care about people that are difficult to like. It's a testament to the fact that life's hardships can only make the survivors stronger. In many ways, this is a fully rounded piece driven by character development and I really liked it. KGHarris, 5/11.

At first, I thought I'd really like this film as it had some engaging aspects. However, it soon became annoying as h. Yes, I understood the childhood rejection and abandonment, as well as non-nurturance from her caregivers. But I was unable to feel anything for this girl aside from wondering if this would be as predictable as I thought it would be. The actor who played her boyfriend was totally annoying, but what finally got me totally bonkers was when they tried to inject a soundtrack in spots. It was distracting and didn't fit at all. This film was a waste of time for me.

"Stolen Life" is one of those movies you watch in fascination, with your heart and soul watching this young girl grow up in a life that seems so true and so innocent. And yes, it's that innocent hidden part that grows to trust other people/strangers like MuYu who loves her, or she believes loves her so - at least it's the kind of love she's never had, never gotten from her parents, her relatives, anyone. And this is the type of attention/love that destroys lives because Yanni trusts MuYu with making all the choices, or complying with the choices she doesn't know how to make.

"Stolen Life" is such a possibility in many lives, it's sad to believe it's so true. I've met people in this situation, and for moments watching MuYu treat Yanni like the love of his life, and her accepting his faults and falling in love for the first time in her life, and it seemed her life was turning around, with college at the corner and a life beyond the village - you'll be amazed at what happens.

Amazed at how easy Yanni let things happen to herself, how easy it was for MuYu to be with Yanni, how easy life gives us the unexpected but yet it's really all manipulated and we didn't even see it right in front of our own eyes! Sometimes we just live in a passive-aggressive live, accepting things as they are and letting opportunities pass us by.

The acting is subtle, but extremely powerful. For some scenes, you don't even have the main character/Yanni speaking for minutes on end, and you don't need to - the actress conveys all you need to know about Yanni's character. From her silence, to her rarely seen smile, to her yearning for love and to be loved and in love, the actress Zhou Xun does a wonderful job. The same can be said for the actor Jun Wu, who plays MuYu, he's deceiving to the eyes at first - a nice guy hidden under that black cap. Even when the truth comes out, you still see a guy who was his true self when he met her, and how since their first meet everything just unraveled. There is definitely 20/20 hindsight if you look back at their relationship, how MuYu left some things unexplained, and Yanni let things slide, and things snowballed from there to change their future/relationship.

Superb movie! Highly recommended++ Understanding Mandarin is not necessary, as there are subtitles, but you do catch some things not translated. This movie should be shown to everyone young and thinks they are in love...they'll find out love is just another of life's four-letter words.

I think this film most women would find interesting to watch. A movie about a guy that takes advantage of an innocent girl.

That is pretty much the concept of the movie but what I really just watched was a story of an extremely naive and gullible girl whose character isn't very believable. No one is that naive!

The story about a girl who spent her life rejecting her family and only confiding in her cousin of whom she made a bond with leaves home one day and opens herself up all of a sudden to the first person she meets. This just didn't make any sense to me. Most of the time people that come from situations as this girl grew up in are wary of people and don't open up so easily because they are cautious. This girl falls head over heals in 10 minutes and invites this stranger into her life without knowing anything about him. Even the decisions she made to cast her school aside for the sake of making him happy didn't make sense to me. She knew the life she would have if she didn't go to school because she had been living it all along but she cast it aside for what? If this was a realistic film she would of focused on school not as to dishonor her family and the sacrifices they made even if she didn't care for them. School was her only way out I think it be the last thing she would want to ruin.

Although when I was in school I remember there always being the handful of girls that ended up getting pregnant and dropping out of the University or whatever. It happens a lot these days but for the same reasons as the girl in this film. She goes to school to focus on love and not to focus on her education and that's how things come apart.

This film 2/5 it's a chinese chick flick.