If business executives are looking to China for its low manufacturing costs and sizable market, political leaders are studying a state perceived to have found a recipe for lifting millions out of poverty with fast growth, even if that means a stiff measure of domestic repression.
Was this a sign of his passion, his commitment, his rejection of the ghastly English emotional repression that worshipped the "stiff upper lip"?
Wang's own tension, fraught between nerves and desire, is grimly contextualised by the chorus of friends and relations who mill around the furtive lovers, their stiff rectitude and avid, gossipy gestures sketching out a milieu of repression and constraint.
The lead role gives Mr. Day-Lewis's natural charisma more of a chance to assert itself, but his portrayal feels muffled — he's constrained by the stiff-upper-lip sentimentality of the story and the clichés of repression and nobility that Alex represents.
In the end, most people were so buttoned-up that doctors started to wonder whether a stiff upper lip wasn't actually a health risk, and to question whether repression wasn't responsible for many of the things anger is blamed for these days.
By contrast, Tim Barrow as Lieutenant George Yolland is making the opposite journey, casting off his stiff patrician costume for the allure of a landscape free of his brand of buttoned-up repression.
Repression fed extremism.
The emotional repression.
