Coal miner's daughter

I came across a newly digitalised Coal Miner's Daughter. Although I had technically watched it, I grabbed it from the shelf with a rather mixed feeling.

It must be 1984 when I first watched it - during the what must be the first American Film Festival in China. Hungry for anything different and from the English speaking world, we - myself and some of my roommates decided to skip a Chinese class and cycled to the nearest cinema located in a heavy machine factory, now the site of private housing. Five films were on show and that afternoon, it was a double billing for Star War and Coal Miner's Daughter. Star War was too much of a fantasy boy film for me with aliens and strange gadgets flying around the enigmatic universe, and it was the latter that kept me confused for a long time. We were used to the idea that film is supreme and should be didactic. We had never been exposed anything so 'complicated', gritty and realistic. Furthermore, the bedroom scene in her first night, rough and crude, was too suggestive for an eighteen year old raised in a society where sex was a taboo. The impression that the leading actress was not the typical glamorous 'beauty' also puzzled us with little exposure to the outside world. I could not remember what we talked about after the films but surely nobody remembered her much.

That afternoon was memorable - also because it was the first time we took advantage of the freedom that came with being a university student now free from the incessant demand of scoring high marks to get into a good university. The thrill to skip a class was remarkable without realising that some among us had to pay high price for it. At that Chinese class with over 100 students, students were asked to submit an essay at the end of the two hour session. The absentees were penalised twice - for being absent and for not submitting the essay. At the end of the term, I had a 'failure' for one of the assignments never submitted and a pass in Chinese - which disqualified me from being entered a 'Three Distinguished Student' selection (Distinguished in moral, academic study and physical education), the first 'black mark' since I was in Primary four!

The funny thing was ever since then, it didn't seem to matter how 'bad' I scored in all subjects and I had since decided to throw myself into what took my fancy the most - namely, classical music which I listened to whenever I could in the dorm while my roommates were listening to English tapes to improve their listening comprehension; and literature - which I devoured when I was supposed to going over the essays in the textbook.

In those days, I didn't really know the name of the actors except for those highly profiled by the Chinese Popular Cinema, sold millions of copies back in the 1980s. It was not until the last few years when I came across films like Three Women, Bedlands and In the Bedroom that the Sissy Spacek was registered in my brain. Her freckle face - which was a big turn-off for both boys and girls in Chinese culture failed to inspire me to check out who she was when I had to select and show fresh students scenes from Carrie to help them to analyse and write an essay on it. Neither had the film appealed to me and I had never managed to see the symbolic meanings in depicting a teenage girl that way. I was not impressed.

But I have become quite a fan of hers ever since Three Women, and sometimes I wonder if she had a more conventional beauty or glamour, would her stardom be higher, and the eighteen year old me more impressed by her performance in Coal Miner's Daughter.