Ever since I saw the Chinese Acrobats and Magicians of Taiwan at the Minskoff Theater at the age of 5, I’ve always been a little bit fascinated with China. Frankly, who isn’t? While “Yang Ban Xi” concerns itself with Mme. Mao’s “Modelworks” and the nexus of art and propaganda, nostalgia and kitsch and the ambivalence of pride-in-one’s-work despite an awareness of its inherent dishonesty, this is also one of the more fascinating documents one is likely to see about what life is like in urban China today. What the hell are Mme. Mao’s “Modelworks?” Well if you aren’t Chinese or an avid reader of John Pareles ca. 1998, you may be unaware that virtually all new theater and film in China was halted during the Cultural Revolution to be replaced exclusively by a handful of pre-approved ardently pro-Revolutionary propaganda operettas that come across today as a wide-eyed wash of color-saturated Busby Berkley-esque odes to agrarian reform. These “Modelworks,” created with varying degrees of involvement by Chairman Mao’s wife herself (she a grumpy ex-actress) are, to phrase it eloquently, fucking amazing. Today, of course, they are high kitsch to the younger generation (just imagine if the Partridge Family was about collective farming!!) but to the now old(ish) dancers and composers, they represent the high point of their career, even if it represents deathly propaganda at its most vile. What makes this film such a treasure, though, is that this is only background. The film is actually a Chris Marker-esque tone poem on modern China, replete with power lunches, discotheques and teenage dance troupes Spice Girls-ing up Mme. Mao’s great proletarian ballets of resistance. Anyone who isn’t fascinated by every inch of this movie just can’t recognize the good things in life.