| Having thoroughly enjoyed so many recent Chinese films, I was looking forward to Zhou Yu’s Train, directed by Zhou Sun and just released on DVD. However, while films such as Shower (1999), Beijing Bicycle (China and Taiwan, 2001) and The Road Home (1999) convey a poignant beauty, albeit by completely different means, Zhou Yu’s Train is overly self-conscious in its attempts to pull sighs from its audience.
Zhou Yu (Gong Li of Raise the Red Lantern) is a painter of porcelain who falls in love with an aspiring poet (Tony Leung Ka Fai), once she learns she is his muse. He lives in a distant city so in order to be with him, she makes a long journey by train twice a week. As much as she inspires his writings, he maintains a distance from her and is unsure of the motivation for her affection. "Do you love my poems or do you love me, the person?" he asks. The answer seems obvious given that the poems are woven through the film in a way that is at first elegant, but soon becomes tiresome.
Although the poetry can be overbearing at times, the story is genuinely touching and greatly enhanced by Li’s performance. She conveys Zhou Yu’s polarities and the single-minded determination of a lonely soul searching for perfect love, practically through her expressive eyes alone. This determination leads her to try, not successfully, to turn away from the affections of another man she meets on the train. The most engaging segments of the film are the scenes she shares with this man, Zhang (Honglei Sun). This is where her character is most revealed and, ironically, the chemistry and romance are most palpable.
When she is with her poet, unfortunately, the romance dissolves. Call me adolescent (or maybe I saw Airplane one too many times), but there is something about torrid love scenes being juxtaposed against shots of rushing trains (emerging from and entering into tunnels, no less), without a trace of irony, that makes me guffaw. What is meant to convey romance, passion and emotional fulfillment comes off as a bit silly.
In one scene a room is bathed in light made ethereal by sheets of verse-filled paper floating through the air that suggest the poet’s words have come to life in the lovers’ hearts as well as in their bed. Even spare but beautiful art direction such as this doesn’t completely save this scene or the rest of the film. This is where the poetry of the film truly disappears into the dark tunnel of cliché, never to emerge.
Scenes loop back on themselves and time is manipulated in the process, but this does not seem to have any relevance to the story. There is no point to it except to make it self-consciously arty through a cinematic device that is powerful when it is successful, but trite and disjointed when it is not.
Another problematic scene occurs at the film’s conclusion, when a character that has appeared intermittently on the train as Zhou Yu’s apparent doppelganger (Gong Li in a dual role, differentiated by a bad haircut) becomes part of the actual storyline and lobs another eye-roller at the audience. The plot twist is meant to be devastatingly romantic, but just isn’t.
As lovely as it is at times, Zhou Yu’s Train tries too hard to be poetic and in doing so becomes derailed (hey, when in Rome…) by too many clichés. It may be that part of the film’s awkwardness is centred around its attempt to display a modern and progressive China to itself and the rest of the world, even while troubling casual references to a colonized Tibet are made. Whatever the reason, if you want to see what real poetry Chinese cinema is capable of, there are, as mentioned before, other options. |
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