ABSTRACT
The film is constructed through a series of juxtapositions of different and supposedly incongruous realms: the local, the global, the foreign, the Chinese, the Western, the colonial, the ethnic, the deliberate and the naïve. This chapter theorizes camp's simultaneous downward and upward movements as the film's critical strategy with which the very categorical certainty of what constitutes the "high" and what the "low" is, if not called into question, rendered frivolous and clumsy. The voice-over by our protagonist Wang Cailing on the "Spring-Comes" and its sensitive wind at the outset of film is sentimental and artsy. The claustrophobic social surveillance of any possible trespasser of normativity starts to make the film viewers' laugher uncomfortable. The encounter between Wang the singer and Hu Jinquan the dancer is the climax and also end of film's campiness. The habitual equation of "West" with the "global", despite its historical actuality, is rejected in film by the so called postcolonial ethnic community at "local" level.
