AFI Review: Please Vote For Me

Adrienne Gruben’s reviews continue to delight. Here’s her recap of a documentary about a grade-school election in China. If I were keeping categories of Movies I Want to See Soon, Movies I’m Glad I Didn’t, and Movies I Hope to Catch Sometime on TV, this one in particular would be high up in that first group. Adrienne’s thoughts are after the jump.

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For our 6th-grade mock elections, my best friend Margaret Herndon played Independent candidate John Anderson and my other best friend Lisa Loeb played Democrat Jimmy Carter. I preferred to work backstage and managed Lisa/Jimmy’s campaign. Sarah Anne Holton played Ted Kennedy, a task she took as seriously as Margaret, Lisa, and I took ours. Or did we? It was a version of seriousness undercut by, well, being 6th graders, which involved a lot of dedication to making dotty-lettered campaign posters, preparing speeches (written mostly by our folks), and also, a lot of Mork-N-Mindy sticker collecting and tactical lunch seating.

Replace the names Margaret, Lisa, and Sally (Sarah Anne’s nickname) with Cheng, Lo, and Xiao and you’ve got Please Vote For Me, an equal parts hysterically funny and horrifying account of 3rd graders in Wuhan, China running for class monitor in the school’s first-ever election. The role of class monitor was previously appointed by teachers, but in an effort to provide instruction about democratic elections, the rules are changed, and democracy 3rd-grade style goes into motion. Aside from conversational Mandarin and ramen noodles in restaurants where shirtless men cluster around tables to eat, the three candidates and their folks’ parenting and campaigning styles could be straight out of North Dallas. Or Washington, D.C.

Cheng, a pudgy 8-year-old who prefers running around his tiny apartment in his underwear and watching TV to almost anything else (Elliot Spitzer, anyone?), is the strongest debater and clearest political thinker. He gets pointers from his mother, a witty, focused TV producer, and sweet step-dad, whose man-to-man advice sometimes appeals to Cheng more than his mother’s. Cheng’s campaigning instincts are the first to kick in — and also backfire. In an attempt at negative campaigning, Cheng thinks it’s a good idea to heckle Xiao, his female opponent. But it’s not a good idea, as the entire class bursts into tears of remorse, and Cheng apologizes profusely.

Lo, the scrappy incumbent, whose monitoring style is nothing short of dictatorial bordering on violent, is the first to grasp democracy in its “truest” sense. When his police chief parents machine-gun fire old-school campaigning tactics at him over a delicious-looking bowl of beef and vegetables, he rejects them, explaining that he would like his classmates to “think for themselves.” But when he arrives at school the next day and encounters Cheng’s pushy campaign in full swing, he returns home crestfallen and ready to adopt their strategies. This involves Lo inviting the kids on an impressive class trip to the police-run monorail and leading them in song on the train. This is a trick that advances his position amongst his classmates, and one only his parents could have provided. This is particularly harmful to Xiao’s campaign whose single, school-administrator mom regretfully admits that she has neither the time nor the resources that Lo’s parents have. Xiao is the graceful, soft-spoken underdog whose tendency toward tears is always followed by an impressive reset to a stiff upper lip.

Speeches, back-room promises to appoint classmates to vice-chair positions in exchange for votes, and the gathering of damning evidence on their opponents make it easy to forget that these are children just learning about democracy. That is, until Lo and Xiao end up in a masterful game of “Nunh-unh. You!!” Or is it so different from the current campaign climate? All I know is, when Lo began to sink against Cheng’s accusations of being a dictator instead of a manager, it reminded me of Sally Holton’s self-incriminating Chappaquiddick apology speech where she explained that the water had erased her memory and she could only recall, “I dove, and I dove and I dove…”

I will not tell you who wins in Please Vote For Me, but I will say that the winner employs some of the oldest political machining in the books to do so. Some much for “new democracy.” — Adrienne Gruben