Beijing Bicycle is a subtle, beautifully made film and a seemingly good-natured social commentary on contemporary Beijing.

Unfortunately, it's pretty boring.

Guei (Cui Lin) is a country boy of 16 who has had the good fortune to find a decent job in the big city. Not only has he found work as a bicycle courier, but there's a uniform and a magnificent mountain bike involved in the deal. Better yet, Guei gets to keep the bike after working off its cost.

Alas, just before the bike is to become his, it is stolen. Part of the difficulty with Beijing Bicycle is not the predictability of such matters, but the dread they inspire in a viewer.

Anyway, Guei swears to find his bicycle again, even though there are literally millions of bikes in the city.

Amazingly, he finds it. But another young man named Jian (Li Bin) has the stolen bike and fully intends to keep it as his own. Our country hero just steals it back. Then Jian's gang of friends beats up Guei to get the bike back. And back. And forth. And back. And forth. Eventually, the two young men make a compromise that seems to work, but all of society is captured in the boys who fight over bikes and ownership and social pecking order.

Beijing Bicycle, flattish narrative aside, has plenty of humour and visual flourish. Not quite enough to make this one a must-see, but never mind.

The contrasts within a city like Beijing are played up, and Guei's character -- the country mouse is tenacious, honest, respectful and innocent -- is held up against the various corruptions available in the big city.

The boy who has Guei's bike gets to rail against the older generation. It's all sort of obvious, which might explain why several characters, among them Guei's boss, seem to be convenient stereotypes.

Nonetheless, Beijing Bicycle won the jury prize and two other major awards at the Berlin Film Festival last year.

The director, Wang Xiaoshuai, is better known for hard-edged films about China -- but he also had to jump through hoops to get those movies past censors in his country, and saw his debut feature, The Day, blacklisted a decade ago.

Maybe he just wanted to lighten up with Beijing Bicycle.

(This film is rated PG)

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