Poster of 33 Postcards

33 Postcards

dislike: Dislike

Crime, Drama, Music

Director: Pauline Chan

Release Date: April 15, 2013

Where to Watch

I am uncertain as to how or when I heard of 33 Postcards, which is currently streaming on Amazon, but I know why it attracted my attention. A Chinese Vietnamese woman, Pauline Chan, who eventually chose to live in Australia, directed and cowrote it. It has a Chinese girl protagonist and costars Guy Pearce, who is an excellent, hot actor. Considering the historical context of the one child policy, the story sounded full of potential about an orphan, Mei Mei, who decides to meet her Australian sponsor.
I did not discover the following until after I watched 33 Postcards, but it was a co-production between Australia and China. The Screen Producers Association of Australia and China Screen alliance work together to mutually facilitate navigating bureaucracy in their respective countries. I am neither Chinese, nor Australian so my reception of the film is likely because something got lost in translation. Chan explained that Europe disproportionately influences Australia even though the country is physically closer to Asia so she applauded the alliance in order to even the scales, but those scales will not be shifting an inch with the existence of this film.
Even though the film is ninety-seven minutes long, roughly only seven minutes are spent in China, which was disappointing and led to the film being deliberately visually dull. We are supposed to notice the difference between the bucolic, verdant, innocent countryside of her orphanage and the gray, dull, urban, corruption of the city since the landscape respectively reflects the orphan and sponsor’s history and experiences without excessive prose dumps. He lives in a fallen world. The movie definitely gets points for showing, not telling.
I love horror movies, but I cannot handle dramas like 33 Postcards. This movie was too stressful because here is this young, naïve girl in Australia who trusts a bunch of shady Australian criminals. It is plausible that a sixteen-year old girl would just wander off and try to meet someone that she never met. I watch Australian movies such as Animal Kingdom and The Snowtown Murders, which are based on true stories. The film is aiming to be a sardonic, gritty Hallmark movie about culture clashes and redemption, but I could not stop thinking that she would end up raped, dead and dismembered in an unmarked grave. I just could not accept the movie as it was. It did not help that I saw it on DVD, which had no subtitles, but the streaming version does. With the Australian and Chinese accents, no subtitles negatively colored my reception of the film since I use them during all my viewing activity.
33 Postcards is supposed to be about how two people who are alone can find a home in wanting the best for or believing the best about the other. Her sponsor is not whom Mei Mei expects, but it does not diminish her feelings of gratitude and love for him. Their correspondence is a place of imagination which he creates, but they share and inhabit, that is better than the world that they live in, an Eden. Instead of Daddy Warbucks, imagine if Annie’s benefactor was wholly inappropriate and associated with the worst people, but somehow he was essentially decent.
33 Postcards has a lot of inexplicably decent though immersed in extremely violent criminal activity. There is the collector who really wants to cook. While I love Pearce and am sure that his performance is due to the filmmaker’s deficiencies, not his, I hate it when films forget that the character whom they are creating did not begin when the film started. His character acts as if it was his first day in a correctional facility. I understand that he may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but the movie does treat him as if he is brand new. Chen is unsuccessful at striking the right tone of this film. There is a protection racket and stolen car market, which weighs the story down disproportionately in a direction that makes it too far away from the possibility of any happy ending.
33 Postcards is also supposed to be a coming of age story for Mei Mei as she finally gets to hang out with kids her age, has an unrealistically nice guy interested in her and explores her identity without strict, adult guidance. It is a storyline that would work if the stakes were not too high and only briefly explored. Apparently Chen was inspired by stories about homeless children, but she never conveys it in her depiction of Mei Mei’s Australian adventures. She is never bothered with quotidian worries such as how she will eat, find shelter or survive. She is brave, but gains no sense of self-preservation and seems oblivious to danger when faced with it.
33 Postcards’s denouement felt rushed and contrived. Mei Mei feels less like a character, and more as a test for the Australian characters to pass so they can save their soul. Her cluelessness and their responsibility for her makes them reach a moral, melodramatic crossroads between choosing good and evil, crime. It is absurd. If I was a criminal, I would care more about making money and committing crime than bringing someone who does not know the score who could blow it, but people have big egos so maybe?
I hate films like 33 Postcards which make a child feel as if an adult needs them. It is not a child’s job to help an adult, but an adult’s job to raise a child. I cannot root for her to stay in Australia and become her sponsor’s family! Just judging her situation from watching this film, not real life factors, go back to China! Mei Mei think of her sponsor as her father, but so does the movie, and the movie fails when it cosigns her lack of judgment. Even the social worker thinks that it is a good idea. The bar is rolling on the ground. Just because she is a foreign orphan does not mean that she is worse off than he is. There is an implicit assumption that a family of criminals would be appropriate guardians just because they live in a country perceived to be better than China because of pro-Western (or worse) bias. Maybe it is, but the movie never illustrates how.
There is one notable, unexpected performance from Matt Nable, who plays a prison enforcer. I did not recognize him, but he played Ra’s al Ghul in Arrow. Nable has a James Purefoy quality without the humor.
I cannot recommend 33 Postcards. It is a melodramatic, contrived mess. Not every movie was made for me so maybe I just do not get it because I am not the target audience, but as an outsider in terms of race and nationality, I was disappointed at how the story fell short in creating a three-dimensional Chinese girl who is a character in her own right. Instead she seems to primarily exist so a white savior can save her or a flawed character can find redemption. Mei Mei deserved better.

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