BEIJING - Beijing is a magical, modern city of sleek, glass-and-steel high-rises where young people cruise the boulevards hanging out of open jeeps, laughing and smiling as though it were Spring Break at Daytona Beach.
Or ... Beijing is a polluted, open construction site where the sun never shines and people drift through meaningless sexual encounters in a society that worships wealth.
These two competing portraits of China's capital will be playing this winter on television sets, in movie theaters and at the arrival terminal at Beijing Airport.
The first image comes from a deftly crafted, five-minute commercial to promote the city's bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics and can be seen on CCTV 1, the national network. The alternative view is presented in a strikingly realistic film called "Summer Heat," which follows the life of a cab-driving Lothario and opens at theaters here in February.
The movie was originally titled "I Love Beijing," but government censors rejected the name as too sarcastic.
The film and the advertisement offer contrasting images of Beijing, a sprawling city of 13 million that is full of energy, bristling with contradictions and defying simple description. And the dueling visions illustrate the gap between how the Chinese government wants the city to be perceived and its gritty reality.
In something of a departure, Zhang Yimou, one of China's top film directors, oversaw shooting of the commercial. He and a team of directors and cameramen spent August and September capturing Beijing on film at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The result is a cinematic makeover blending images of traditional Chinese culture with modern architecture and Western influences. In the hands of Zhang, a city that sometimes resembles an enormous provincial town looks like a sophisticated capital.
The scenes include a man swinging a Chinese yo-yo in the air beneath cloudless skies at Oriental Plaza, Beijing's glistening new shopping mall east of Tiananmen Square. In another sequence, young boys hurtle past the vermilion walls of an alley kicking a soccer ball. And in a third, a foreign teen-ager wearing in-line skates rolls along a marble walkway in front of the concentric blue tile roofs of Beijing's Temple of Heaven.
In fact, Zhang has done such a good job of presenting the capital's modern face that some residents who have seen the commercial don't recognize the city.
