Springtime in a Small Town

This a love story of sorts set in the 1940's in post-war China. It is a love triangle or a love quadrangle, depending if you include the 16-year-old young lady who was yet to know love at her age, or was about to.

The story is fairly typical: a loveless marriage, probably sexless due to the husband's ill health, but a marriage nevertheless with the wife doing her best to look after her ailing husband. Then an old lover showed up to create turmoil in their otherwise peaceful, though probably unhappy, lives.

I find the acting a bit green at places. The pace was slow. But the setting, both indoor and outdoor, was visually beautiful and the story, told in an unhurried fashioned, engaging. There are no bad guys here. And yet grief and unhappiness prevailed simply because things just happened that way. And changes were simply out of the question because they lived in an era where people were bound by certain moral obligations.

This film demands patience, but is one that engages. Director Tian has told a common love story well.

I usually don't dig Chinese movies. As far as asian cinema is concerned, I am more a Japanese or Korean fan. But this Springtime is bliss. Just about everything is beautiful, from script to cinematography to acting (with the notable exception of the girl who plays the young sister, whom I thought was over-acting).

One thing I thought was interesting is the way director Tian expressed his intention of editing from the original version of the movie (shot in the '50s) all the elements that would not appeal to a viewer today. Therefore, we must assume that pre-arranged weddings are still a common fact in today's China. What about love ?

Well, enough for the pseudo-sociological analysis. On a more pleasure-oriented level, this is a jewel. Not a perfect movie, granted, I couldn't rate it more than the 8 I gave it, but such a nice little piece of work. Colors, sounds, camera movements, actor's play, everything is fluid, warm, inhabited. A very nice springtime in a small town indeed...

May be if all films were like Springtime in a Small Town, life would be a tad boring. As it is, the film is a fresh breeze in a stale room, which is also an apt metaphor for the story of a childhood friend and old flame reappearing in a small town, disrupting a dull, lifeless marriage.

This film is understated to the point of being minimalist. It is set in the aftermath of the Second World War, in a small town that has been systematically bombed and now mostly in ruins. In a run down old house lives a husband with a mysterious ailment; his young sister; a wife unsure of what she is looking for in life, certain only that she hasn't found it yet, and an old manservant. Into this mix comes a doctor from the big city, visiting his old friend. Upon arriving he is surprised to discover him married to his childhood sweetheart, the luminescent Yewen (Jing Fan Hu).

So, we have the classic love triangle: except may be not. The tensions which develop between the three main leads are delightfully understated, but culminate in several set pieces of pure drama. Best of all, plot resolution is achieved without the director/scriptwriter feeling the need to tie up all of the emotional loose ends as well. Some may find this leaves an empty feeling. Me, I thought that's life.

If you need another reason to watch this film (apart from the gentle, delicate story and the lovely acting) there is also the gorgeous cinematography of Ping-Bin Lee. This is not of the I-suspect-soon-to-be-ubiquitous overripe Christopher Doyle school, but an altogether more subtle and engaging beauty (though, interestingly, they worked together to create the Hong Kong classic, In the Mood for Love). Lee seems to be able to find beauty and mood in broken buildings, barren spaces and muted colours. It is a tragedy that the MTV generation pushed this film into the repertory theatres, as I would have loved to have seen it on a really big screen.

I suppose people fed and watered on I Robot and Saving Private Ryan might well yawn all the way through Springtime in a Small Town, but I think it was easily the best film (that I saw) in 2002. Well worth its 9/10 rating.

Liyan and Yuwen live in a rural town in post-war China. Liyan's impotence and health worries have meant that the couple remain childless, although they do look after his younger sister. The emotional separation that Yumen feels with her husband has caused a physical separation, with the couple sleeping in separate rooms. Liyan is surprised but pleased when school friend Zhang Zhichen comes to visit him – although he is surprised to learn that Zhang grew up with Yuwen before he met him. What he doesn't know though is that the pair were young lovers and, while young Xiu falls for the older Zhang, Yuwen also battles the sexual desire within herself.

The plot makes it sound like a very folded in affair that gives little away but suggests lots and that is pretty much exactly what this film is. When I taped it I thought that I was going to be watching the original film rather than this remake but I still found it well worth the watch even if some say it is an inferior film. That may just be a bit of film snobbery (though I have not seen the original) because I personally found this version to be quite rewarding and interesting. It requires patience though, and anyone tuning in not prepared to sit silently for two hours should probably not bother starting it because it is a film that, on the surface, doesn't have a great deal going on. It is the inaction rather than the action that makes the film interesting because it is all about the repression inherent in the characters and, supposedly, the society they live in.

Of course the mood of the film is very obvious and some viewers will just sigh and say "oh good another foreign period film about sexual repression" and I must admit that here and there I was thinking that because it does fold in on itself so much at times that I worried it would create a black hole. Fortunately it does just enough to avoid this and for the majority it keeps the surface moving by allowing the audience to see the undercurrents clearly. It won't be to everyone's taste but if you like things like In The Mood For Love and Merchant & Ivory films then you will enjoy this.

Director Tian makes the film look great and his slow, patient camera movements compliment the material well and helped me as a viewer get into it. The cast are also good and benefit from having few others to distract from the main characters. Jingfan Hu is strong as Yuwen and is able to suggest great passion and desire under the skin of a seemingly patient and quiet woman. Likewise Bai Qing Xin plays his character the same way and does well to work with and against Hu. Jun Wu has a harder task and, although he is good, I didn't think he had as clear and understandable a character as the other two. Si Si Lu is OK but the film rightly sees her as a side issue.

Overall this is a fine film that is worth seeing if you have the patience which it does ask you to have. The emotions are stifled but not to the point where the film dies away or appears cold – rather it is tense and dramatic for the most part. At times it threatens to fold away like a deckchair but mostly it is engaging and beautifully crafted.

The Chinese film Springtime in a Small Town is a stately, unwaveringly discreet movie, but one with more quiet resonance than many of its Western equivalents. It reminds us superficially of the films of Merchant-Ivory - it possesses the sense of tactful distance, the quality of not wanting to deal with any unseemly emotions, that characterizes such staid, painterly efforts as Howards End, A Room With a View and that classic of repressed-librarian-cinema, The Remains of the Day - but director Zhuangzhuang Tian has a greater talent for letting emotion slip in the backdoor than James Ivory, who is often lauded for his subtlety, but is not criticized enough for being a prudish old grandma. Zhuangzhuang's film involves a quartet of characters engaged in a slow, elegant emotional dance. The story takes place in the aftermath of WWII, when China is just starting to pick up the pieces after the devastation wrought on it by the Japanese. Sickly Dai Liyan (Jun Wu) lives with his dutiful-but-frustrated wife Yuwen (Jingfan Hu) and bubbly young sister Xiu (Si Si Lu) in a large, dilapidated house; Liyan's old friend Zhang Zhichen (Bai Qing Xin), a doctor and ex-resistance-fighter from Shanghai, drops in for a visit, much to the delight of everyone in the dreary household. Zhichen, it turns out, was also childhood friends with Yuwen and Xiu; we quickly realize that Zhichen and Yuwen still have feelings for each other, and learn that they had designs on marriage before the war whisked Zhichen away. The personalities of the characters are all carefully delineated, and fit with each other like pieces of a puzzle; Zhuangzhuang puts the picture together slowly, eschewing big dramatic revelations for moments where the relationships take subtle shifts. Such an exercise in formality, peopled by characters who are not exactly big on coming out with anything (except little Xiu, who has still not learned what it means to be a lady), will inevitably wear on the patience at times, but Zhuangzhuang has a way of injecting enough subdued poetry into his images that we don't mind the time it takes for the pieces to snap into place. It's not the kind of movie that reaches for big emotional effects, but neither is it the type that seems to shy away from emotion altogether. Movies like the Merchant-Ivory works are fastidious, grammatically impeccable and fairly heartless, while Springtime in a Small Town, for all its restraint, manages to resonate in the end. The difference between James Ivory and Zhuangzhuang Tian is obvious - Ivory keeps his distance for fear of emotion, while Zhuangzhuang keeps his out of simple politeness.