Jonathan Richards
ZHOU YU'S TRAIN
Directed by Sun Zhou
PG-13, 97 minutes
In Mandarin with subtitles
LADY OF THE LAKE
By the time a movie has made the journey from the far corners of the world to American art house screens, we pretty much take it for granted that this is going to be a treat. It's surprising, then, and in a curious way a bit reassuring, to find a vapid, uninspired picture like Zhou Yu's Train rolling into our station.
It is more surprising still when you consider that the movie stars Gong Li (The Story of Qiu Ju, Shanghai Triad), the reigning queen of Chinese cinema. She plays the dual roles of Zhou Yu, an artist in a porcelain factory, and Xiu, about whom I can't tell you very much except that she's the narrator and she has shorter hair. It is not even completely clear from much of the movie that these are in fact two different characters, since they're both obviously Gong Li. I found myself guessing that it was the same character in different time contexts, and trying to figure out what those contexts were. But it turns out that Xiu is a separate character, and one who has also had a relationship with Zhou Yu's lover, the poet who wrote a book of verse called "Zhou Yu's Train". Once you get this, you then have to wonder if the whole story is in Xiu's head. Or maybe you will no longer care.
The train of the title takes Zhou Yu from Sanming, the northern industrial city where she lives, to the rural town of Chongyang where her lover lives. Her lover is Chen Qing (Tony Leung Ka Fai, not to be confused with Tony Leung Chiu Wai, of Hero). Chen Qing (spelled Ching in the subtitles) is a poet who teaches in a local school and lives in what appears to be a book store or library. To drive home what a serious bookish sort he is, we see him working out by doing arm lifts with packages of books, the veritable embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano. Chen has written a poem in which he compares Zhou Yu to a sacred lake, Xan Hu, which is the movie's second central metaphor, after the train, and a little ahead of Chen's bookstore home and a few other things. He gives her the poem at a dance, and it wins her heart. She decides that with a little push from her, he can become a successful poet, and to be sure she can reach him whenever she needs to she gives him a pager. Chen is not a pager kind of a guy, and you have a feeling right then that this relationship may not last.
Zhou Yu becomes a familiar figure on the train, and eventually she attracts the attention of a fellow traveler, veterinarian Dr. Zhang Qiang, who presses his attentions on her. By this time the relationship with Chen has ended – riddled with angst over whether she loves him or his poetry, he has taken a teaching job in Tibet – but she still keeps making the train trip. Zhang is as bold and aggressive as Chen was shy and sensitive, but eventually he wins Zhou Yu over, and they become lovers. Zhang isn't a bad sort, though he lacks Chen's poetic soul, and he's probably a better match for Zhou, though you'd never get her to admit it. He even has his own knack with a turn of phrase. He takes her to a lakeside resort, and underlines the essential difference between himself and Chen by telling her "I know my lake is artificial, but at least it's full of water."
This movie became a succès de scandale in China because of its frank sex scenes. But it must be pointed out that what passes for a frank sex scene in China is not the sort of thing to raise the titillation index among Western audiences. To moviegoers jaded by full frontal, a shower scene featuring shoulder blade, even when it's Gong Li's shoulder blade, is not going to pack theaters in and of itself.
The story is by turns insipid and unnecessarily confusing, but there is an aesthetic to the movie that helps out a lot. Part of that aesthetic is Gong Li herself, a beauty of international appeal. Wu Wang's cinematography sometimes rises to visual poetry, although traveling back and forth on that train so much of the time doesn't give full opportunity to his talents.
Director Sun Zhou directed Gong Li once previously, in Breaking the Silence, and as an actor starred with her in Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin. Here he shows a fondness for repetition, as the same scenes and bits of poetry are scattered through the picture like shards of shattered porcelain. (There are also shards of shattered porcelain.) He is also much taken with the slow-motion shot of Gong Li running for the train, and with Freudian imagery of the train traversing the countryside and plunging into tunnels.
For a while the beauty of Gong Li and the appeal of her costars and the exoticism of China can half convince you that this is a lovely, mysterious romance. But that conviction runs out. As Chen Qing says, "If it's in your heart it's real. If it's not, it never will be."
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38531 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1314636 X-RT-TitleID: 1134015 X-RT-SourceID: 896 X-RT-AuthorID: 2779
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews