She, a Chinese

This film, by London-based Chinese ­novelist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo, won the Golden Leopard at Locarno and has been liked and admired on the festival circuit. Understandably so. It is bold and unparochial in a doggedly low-key style, following the story of Li Mei (Lu Huang), a young woman who journeys from a ­remote Chinese village to London, ­finding that "the west" – an idealised place of impossibly glamorous consumer riches – is just as tough as the place she left. In her home town, bored and ­mutinous Li Mei goes to the cinema with a truck driver who sexually assaults her; then she hangs out, blankly, with a moody guy in the pirate-DVD business who is proud that the cousin of ex-premier Jiang Zemin once spoke to him in a nightclub – to tell him to "fuck off". Li Mei winds up as girlfriend of a ­violent gangster Spikey (Wei Yi Bo), a connection that improbably gifts her the means to travel to London. Guo's direction is reticent, perhaps more ­confident in the Chinese half, and the movie itself is less passionate than, say, Nick Broomfield's Ghosts, about ­exploitation in the UK. The rather ­bookish inter-title chapter headings add to a prevailing sense of ­detachment. The move to London gives the film scope and sweep, and the denouement of her relationship with Spikey is certainly ­dramatic, yet the tone of the film is ­persistently subdued: creating the strange, almost surreal sense that Britain is exactly like China. From the viewpoint of the dispossessed, it's probably a fair assessment.