Drama. Starring Gao Yuanyuan and Wang Xueqi. Directed by Chen Kaige. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (Not rated. 121 minutes.)
"Caught in the Web," China's entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar, dramatizes the intrusions on privacy in the Internet age. This makes it a film that Westerners will have no trouble understanding, and yet we might understand it too well.
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Here in the United States, movies have been picking over this material for years. Thus, in all the ways that "Caught in the Web" is similar to better, American fare such as "Disconnect," it has very little to say to us. Its entire appeal rather lies in the way in which it is different.
It tells a story that wouldn't quite make sense in the West, and it tells it in ways that would never get past a test screening. The juxtaposition of the utterly familiar and the utterly foreign is the source of the movie's limited but palpable fascination. In it, we see the collision of modern technology, modern architecture and modern business practices with an ancient culture valuing strict modes of behavior.
A beautiful young executive (Gao Yuanyuan), seemingly with a glorious future in front of her, finds out after a routine physical that she is in the advanced stages of a fatal illness. Understandably depressed, she gets on a bus and refuses to give up her seat to an old man. Someone catches the incident on a smartphone camera, and overnight she becomes a national symbol of uncaring, selfish modern youth. It's hard to imagine anyone caring that much about a routine act of rudeness in the me-first USA.
From there, everything snowballs. Soon the Internet is broadcasting her name and address to the world, and people are accusing her of all sorts of scandalous behavior, none of it true. In the meantime, the movie follows the personal repercussions of the event - for the woman, for her boss and his wife, and for ravenous media people. As a story, "Caught in the Web," from director Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine"), is rather ragged. Gao Yuanyuan makes for a sympathetic heroine, but the satire has little punch and not much wit, and too much of the film consists of people talking about how they feel about things.
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In a way, the most interesting character is the boss, played by Wang Xueqi, who is a complex mix of emotional exactitude, paternal benevolence and coldness. It's hard not to see in him some embodiment of the best of old and new China. He's a self-made capitalist, a powerful and successful man, and at the same time he has a calm dignity that harks back to an earlier ideal.
These are the movie's virtues, but they're mostly anthropological, not cinematic. "Caught in the Web" is of little interest as entertainment, and if it were set in an unimportant or overly familiar country, it would be entirely forgettable.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle's movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle
