Director: Mu Fei
Writer: Tianji Li
Photography: Shengwei Li
Music: Yijun Huang
Editors: Chunbao Wei, Ming Xu
Cast: Wei Wei, Yu Shi, Wei Li, Hongmei Zhang
It surprised me when I realized that, according to the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Spring in a Small Town (presently ranked #161 overall) effectively amounts to the greatest Chinese movie ever made. It's followed on the big list by Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (a very long documentary from 2002, #323), Platform (2000, #376), Yellow Earth (1984, #384), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (?!, 2000, #391). This is all complicated by the ambiguous status of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which have pictures at #42 (In the Mood for Love, 2000), #118 (Yi Yi, 2000), #124 (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991), #192 (A City of Sadness, 1989), #194 (Chungking Express, 1994), and five more in the 300s before getting to Platform and Crouching Tiger. The latter two are credited to China, Hong Kong, and other countries here in our 21st-century global era.
The Western bias appears to be showing—Spring in a Small Town has a title and date that make it sound more like film noir although it is actually an Ozu-like domestic drama. It was released the year before the Chinese Communist Revolution, a regime that suppressed it as decadent and Western until the 1980s. In this ongoing culture war that favors Hong Kong over China in the West and domestic angst over the sweeping currents of time, it seems curious that the 161st-greatest movie of all time exists in one of the shabbiest prints I've ever had to pay for ($2.99) at Amazon Prime. Someone needs to make up their mind about whether or not this is an important and historical film.
It surprised me when I realized that, according to the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Spring in a Small Town (presently ranked #161 overall) effectively amounts to the greatest Chinese movie ever made. It's followed on the big list by Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (a very long documentary from 2002, #323), Platform (2000, #376), Yellow Earth (1984, #384), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (?!, 2000, #391). This is all complicated by the ambiguous status of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which have pictures at #42 (In the Mood for Love, 2000), #118 (Yi Yi, 2000), #124 (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991), #192 (A City of Sadness, 1989), #194 (Chungking Express, 1994), and five more in the 300s before getting to Platform and Crouching Tiger. The latter two are credited to China, Hong Kong, and other countries here in our 21st-century global era.
The Western bias appears to be showing—Spring in a Small Town has a title and date that make it sound more like film noir although it is actually an Ozu-like domestic drama. It was released the year before the Chinese Communist Revolution, a regime that suppressed it as decadent and Western until the 1980s. In this ongoing culture war that favors Hong Kong over China in the West and domestic angst over the sweeping currents of time, it seems curious that the 161st-greatest movie of all time exists in one of the shabbiest prints I've ever had to pay for ($2.99) at Amazon Prime. Someone needs to make up their mind about whether or not this is an important and historical film.
Then again, it's not as if many of these greatest films of all time aren't beset themselves with problems related to their lackluster commercial potential. What is one person's nuanced study of interpersonal complexity is another person's small-bore downer. IMDb gets it right about Spring in a Small Town in a one-sentence synopsis: "A lonely housewife finds her monotonous life altered when her childhood sweetheart returns to town." To be clear, this is more of a good thing for me, comparable in many interesting ways to Brief Encounter, Journey to Italy, and Sunrise as much as the last Ozu picture you saw or a story by Anton Chekhov. The lonely housewife is Yuwen (Wei Wei) who is living with her husband Liyan (Yu Shi) in his family's compound, which has been partially destroyed by imperial Japanese attacks. He also has tuberculosis and suffers from depression.
Liyan's old college friend Zhang (Wei Li), who is a doctor now, shows up for a surprise visit. They have not seen each other in 10 years and Zhang did not know Liyan had married. But as it turns out he knows Yuwen—they grew up together and, as the film reveals by fragments, were in love once and still are. This is pulled off really well, especially on such an obviously low budget, by director Mu Fei, who develops the complexities with a minimum of fuss for about the first hour of the picture. Liyan also has a 16-year-old sister living there who brings even more interesting complexity. But the last third kind of goes sprawling and looks a little like Casablanca in its tonal shifts, as if they were figuring it out as they went and not sure where they were headed. Perhaps needless to say, it's more of a muddle and nowhere near as thrilling as Casablanca.
Someone really needs to restore this thing (Criterion, looking in your direction). For goodness sake, it's the greatest Chinese film ever made and the 161st-greatest of all time. The official IMDb running time is five minutes longer than the version I looked at, which had many problems: lots of detail lost to black or white in the images, jump-cuts for missing footage, audio that simply dropped out when it was obvious characters were talking. Even the subtitles seemed suspect for gaps and miscues of timing. I got so lost in the last third that I went back to look at it again and sort out what was bothering me. Sometimes I felt it was the picture, that it was implying something I wasn't getting. A scene where Yuwen is drinking hard struck me as sad evidence of where she was, for example, but later it seemed to be taken as a unique moment when she was showing joy. Other times, in the confusion of the last third, it looked more like technical problems, lost audio or weird cuts and such.
I don't actually feel like I've seen Spring in a Small Town properly yet. The version on Prime is more like a rough draft, a suggestion of what it could be. It's available elsewhere but at the same low price point, which made me suspicious. For that matter, I have it on DVD but without English subtitles (consumer error)—and that's a bad print too, possibly basically the same one. In a way, I am suspicious of all the Western referents and suspicious that the movie's high critical regard is something of a gesture of cultural condescension, the way Satyajit Ray has also been the critics' main man from India, practically ignoring all of Bollywood, which for all the cheese can have a good deal of merit as film. I think I will like Spring in a Small Town if I ever get to see a restored version, but I'm also definitely second-guessing the critics here because I suspect there are greater and more important and significant Chinese movies.
Liyan's old college friend Zhang (Wei Li), who is a doctor now, shows up for a surprise visit. They have not seen each other in 10 years and Zhang did not know Liyan had married. But as it turns out he knows Yuwen—they grew up together and, as the film reveals by fragments, were in love once and still are. This is pulled off really well, especially on such an obviously low budget, by director Mu Fei, who develops the complexities with a minimum of fuss for about the first hour of the picture. Liyan also has a 16-year-old sister living there who brings even more interesting complexity. But the last third kind of goes sprawling and looks a little like Casablanca in its tonal shifts, as if they were figuring it out as they went and not sure where they were headed. Perhaps needless to say, it's more of a muddle and nowhere near as thrilling as Casablanca.
Someone really needs to restore this thing (Criterion, looking in your direction). For goodness sake, it's the greatest Chinese film ever made and the 161st-greatest of all time. The official IMDb running time is five minutes longer than the version I looked at, which had many problems: lots of detail lost to black or white in the images, jump-cuts for missing footage, audio that simply dropped out when it was obvious characters were talking. Even the subtitles seemed suspect for gaps and miscues of timing. I got so lost in the last third that I went back to look at it again and sort out what was bothering me. Sometimes I felt it was the picture, that it was implying something I wasn't getting. A scene where Yuwen is drinking hard struck me as sad evidence of where she was, for example, but later it seemed to be taken as a unique moment when she was showing joy. Other times, in the confusion of the last third, it looked more like technical problems, lost audio or weird cuts and such.
I don't actually feel like I've seen Spring in a Small Town properly yet. The version on Prime is more like a rough draft, a suggestion of what it could be. It's available elsewhere but at the same low price point, which made me suspicious. For that matter, I have it on DVD but without English subtitles (consumer error)—and that's a bad print too, possibly basically the same one. In a way, I am suspicious of all the Western referents and suspicious that the movie's high critical regard is something of a gesture of cultural condescension, the way Satyajit Ray has also been the critics' main man from India, practically ignoring all of Bollywood, which for all the cheese can have a good deal of merit as film. I think I will like Spring in a Small Town if I ever get to see a restored version, but I'm also definitely second-guessing the critics here because I suspect there are greater and more important and significant Chinese movies.
If memory serves, I gave up on watching the Prime version, the print was so bad.
ReplyDeleteIt really is amazingly bad.
ReplyDelete