In Mandarin with English subtitles.
A taxi: what better vantage point for tracking the evolution of a city? Buildings rise and fall around the driver, who meanwhile crosses paths with a seemingly endless parade of temporary companions, no two in the same circumstances. Taxis are an integral part of a city’s scenery, economy, and social fabric.
Director Miao Wang introduces us to three such itinerant witnesses—Bai JiWen, Zhou Yi, and Wei Caixia—just two years shy of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, at a time when the city is a whirlwind of construction, beautification, and service training. These projects would be intriguing on their own. However, set against the backdrop of a communist nation that is still in the early stages of flexing its competitive muscles on the world stage, they become a bottomless metaphor for a new chapter in China’s sociopolitical epic. The needs and wants of the Chinese people are changing as rapidly as the city skyline, as they experiment with indulging their own capitalistic urges.
Wang’s protagonists take their beloved city’s transformation in with a certain wistfulness. They came of age at a time when ambition was to be eschewed in the quest for equality. But the Beijing of today has something to prove to the world—something that may isolate its own citizens from the community they once knew. Must this trio keep on driving because their home no longer has a place to offer them?
—Sandra L. Frey
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