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Mardi Gras: Made in China |
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Mardi Gras: Made in China records the Girls Gone Wild spectacle of the Bourbon Street celebrations, where gaudy plastic necklaces get flung around in a drunken quid pro quo of boobs for beads. (All together now: "Show us your tits!") Director David Redmon also visits the girls and women who produce the necklaces in the prison-like Tai Kuen factory compound in Fuzhou. They start as early as age 14 and work 12 to 20 hours per day for 10 cents an hour, their hands blistered and bloodied and their dreadful pay routinely slashed when they don't meet their impossible quotas.
Redmon shows his trump card when he screens footage of the New Orleans festivities to the Chinese workers and vice versa; the laborers are mostly amused that anyone would covet such ugly baubles, but back at Mardi Gras central, the images from Tai Kuen push the needle off the record and turn the house lights on the party. "It's not fun," understates a suddenly sober reveler. Also featuring the sanguine realpolitik of the rich, tyrannical Chinese factory boss (whose favorite word seems to be "punishment") and his richer American outsourcer, this sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.
www.villagevoice.com March 21, 2006 |
