Taiwan Film Symposium: Beijing Bicycle

Beijing Bicycle (March 9, 7:30 p.m.): The traditional and the modern collide in this wonderful homage to Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief, which, though set in China, has been included on the program because its producer, Peggy Chiao (a.k.a. "the doyenne of Taiwan film critics"), is attending the symposium. In Beijing Bicycle, the latest member of China's Floating Population ' villagers lured to the city by the promise of economic security ' gets a job as a bike messenger only to have his company-issued bicycle stolen. It turns up later, in the hands of a city kid who sees it as a status symbol, not a means of survival. And the movie's effort to resolve this ownership dispute reveals the tectonic shifts as China pursues free-market economics. What was once a supposedly classless society has increasingly become a nation of country bumpkins and city slickers, a point beautifully brought home when one of the former, having pointed out that Beijing hotels now pipe music into the toilets, says, "I wouldn't be able to pee."