Li Gong, better known as Gong Li in the West, stars in this taut, probing but occasionally confusing love story set in today's China. Extraordinarily beautiful and also very accomplished as an actress, Gong Li is on a hiatus from historical spectacles and films with a threatening, for the government, political subtext. I doubt any cultural satrap was put out by "Zhou Yu's Train."
Zhou Yu paints bucolic and traditional scenes on cheap porcelain before they're finished and sent out to the world's Chinatowns or Chinese cities for sale to tourists. She's talented but so are all the other women in her shop. Great art this ain't.
Zhou Yu regularly takes the train to another city where her not brimming with self-confidence poet boyfriend, Chen Qing, lives. Chen is played by Tony Leung Kafai. On the train she meets veterinarian Zhang Quiang, Hanglei Sun. He pursues her and a triangle develops, not an original one at that.
Director Zhou Sun has Zhou Yu torn between a poet whose so far failed efforts at recognition she wishes to reinvigorate and advance and a country farm animal vet, a more lighthearted chap. The train is a metaphor for separation and emotional journeying. The train takes her between worlds, not just stations.
A bit confusing, at least with subtitles, is Gong Li's second role as a narrator who appears at various points but who also has a direct relationship, apparently platonic, with Chen. Perhaps it's clearer to those who understand Chinese.
While Gong Li has several passionate love scenes, she orgasms without getting undressed, a tired sop to Chinese moral values which impact on directors' freedom. A shower scene shows nothing below her shoulders. Erotic? Actually, very.
The highpoint of the movie is Gong Li's total and believable immersion in a role that isn't very out of the ordinary. But her acting makes the audience care about the resolution of her dilemma, one that I suspect many viewers will not like.
Tony Leung Kafai and Hanglei Sun turn in fine performances in roles clearly subordinated to Zhou Yu's centrality in the tale.
This story would amount to a "B" film if populated by Americans living in the rural Midwest. But as a look at changing mores in China it justifies a
7/10.
