The Great Wall Is a Great Wall

The first American feature film shot in China amounts to rather more than an album of holiday snaps, thanks to the unfamiliarity of the resort and the universality of the situation. A Chinese-American computer executive (Peter Wang) takes his family to visit relatives in Peking. Both branches of the family are enormously curious about each other, so there is plenty of experimenting with language, lipstick, electric blankets, music and squat toilets. Ideological differences are kept at arm's length, and the concept of privacy which is debated would have been as incomprehensible in Imperial China as it is to the Red Chinese. There's no Chinese word for it. Comparative economics don't get much of a look in either, beyond the statistic that a bottle of Coke costs half a day's wages. West confronts East only at the ping-pong table, and the star of the film is Peking itself, still an elegant city of shady courtyards, tree-lined avenues and ancient pagodas, despite Godzilla-type redevelopers.