Buddha's Lock

This has a fascinating subject, based on fact: the arrest and enslavement of a crashed American airman by a backward tribe of the Yi people in central Sichuan during WWII. Unfortunately, it also has a script (by a Mainland Chinese writer) that has no real idea how to set up or develop characters, and constantly lets ethnographic elements get in the way of the narrative. The result is a strange mixture of excellence and hopeless misjudgements, never quite strong enough to overcome the handicap of a weak performance from the main America actor. At its best, it plays like an early Herzog movie: an assault on the very concept of human dignity in primitive, elemental landscapes.