The iconic Chinese musical film, and certainly the most popular among Chinese audiences, Third Sister Liu is a classic. Based on a Zhuang minority folk tale, it is set during the Tang Dynasty, among the spectacularly scenic mountains and rivers landscape of Guilin, in southern China’s Guangxi Province.
Third Sister Liu is a rebel folksinger: famed for her songs urging the poor to oppose their feudal masters, and she’s on the run from dastardly Landlord Mo. Sheltered by an old fisherman and his strapping young son A Niu, who immediately falls for her, Liu is welcomed by the locals, who know her songs and support her defiance. Mo fears her influence: he bans tea cultivation, then even public singing. Undaunted, Liu proposes a public song competition: her and the locals against Mo and his cultivated scholars. Liu trounces the scholars’ pedantically awkward singing with witty improvised folk tunes and fearlessly provocative lyrics. Mo, humiliated, kidnaps her. But A Niu and the locals, abetted by Mo’s maids, who are fans of her singing, conspire to free her. As she and A Niu slip away by boat, her supporters on boats sing her songs in the dark, luring Mo and his men away.
Offering a finely shaped balance of romance, adventure, class struggle, landscape poetry, satire, and folk art, Third Sister Liu offers a perfect cinematic synthesis of entertainment and politics. The central drama has an obvious ideological affinity with Party propaganda, but art, and in particular entertainment, trumps didacticism. The songs, modern compositions based on folk melodies, have become standards. The film’s vibrant power comes from exuberant pacing, vivid characterizations, a barely hinted eroticism (watch how the limp fish Liu’s beloved A Niu wields develops into a fine firm sword), and not the least, a dedication to location shooting unparalleled in Chinese cinema of that era, that brilliantly knits the characters into Guilin’s celebrated natural beauty.