The director of the new film, Tian Zhuangzhuang, was, if not quite buried, forcibly sidelined for a decade following his 1992 film "The Blue Kite."
"Springtime" is set just after World War II, in a provincial village still visibly scarred by Japanese bombings; we may infer that it has something to say about Tian's own rehabilitation, and maybe his nation, too.
In that sleepy village, a young Shanghai doctor, Zhichen (Xin Baiqing), steps down from a train that barely pauses for his debarkation. He walks to the half-derelict ancestral home of Liyan (Wu Jun), an old college chum. Liyan has been in failing health, possibly tubercular; Zhichen diagnoses his ailment as something subtler, related to the tenuous-ness of his marriage. His wife is the beautiful but distracted Yuwen (Hu Jingfan) - Zhichen's own childhood playmate and first love, as he is startled to discover and Liyan is slow to realize.
A number of quiet days and increasingly uneasy nights pass, with Liyan's precocious, barely ado-lescent sister beginning to pick up on the unspoken passion between the former lovers. A couple of fatal crises are confronted, like thunder from a distant horizon suddenly breaking inside the house. Then another train rumbles through town, leaving life as it was and yet utterly transformed.
"Springtime in a Small Town" is not quite like any other film I've seen, though in one particular it recalls the style and worldview of the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi ("Ugetsu," "Sansho the Bailiff"): Many scenes play out in a single, long-running take, with the camera making minute adjustments throughout.
That's an extremely subtle, cumulatively power-ful way to compose a film. Within such a scene/shot, characters are variously linked and separated by architecture and décor, their features revealed one moment, veiled or muted the next. The background becomes a changing canvas, redefined with every shift of camera angle or altitude - adjustments so encompassing and suggestive that their impact seems cosmic.
This happens not only in the meticulously designed interiors but also on the crumbling perimeter wall of the town where some of the most fraught dialogues take place, with miles of terraces at once embracing and remaining remote from the intimate drama in the foreground. The landscape seems one sustained visual sigh.
And in the courtyard garden of the family home, there is a tree, a filigree of red foliage so fragile and yet auspicious, it's like the arteries of a ghost.
Except for Chinese cinema veteran Ye Ziao-keng, who contributes one grace note after another as the old family retainer, all the players are making their screen debuts. And Lu Sisi, radiant as the irrepressible younger sister, is acting for the first time ever. They are all unimprovable, individually and as an ensemble.
"Springtime in a Small Town" shows once only at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 5, at Pacific Place.
If -- and it's a very tall if -- "Springtime" isn't the finest film in SIFF 2003, that distinction may well belong to "Le Cercle Rouge." I hasten to add that I haven't seen "Cercle" yet, but I've been looking forward to it for 30 years.
It's the 12th of 13 feature films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, who was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach but restyled himself in adoration of American movies and literature. He once directed a script by Jean Cocteau ("Les Enfants Terribles") but soon committed to realizing his own vision in some of the cinema's most spiritually invested films. Funny thing is, their heroes tend to be gang-sters, cops, gamblers and lone warriors, all adhering to a samurai code of the director's imagining. Melville's independent status (he had his own studio for a while) and cool aesthetic discipline were an inspiration to the French New Wave and such latter-day disciples as John Woo and Quentin Tarantino.
Made in 1970, "Le Cercle Rouge" saw a brief U.S. release in an English-dubbed version 40 minutes shorter than the French original. SIFF is showing a full restoration Sunday, June 8, at 4 p.m. in the Harvard Exit. The dream cast includes Alain Delon (star of Melville's "Le Samouraï") as a master criminal who gets back to work within an hour of being freed from prison, Gian Maria Volonté as his psychotic rival, Yves Montand as a philosophical felon and Andre Bourvil (normally a comedian) as the patient police detective waiting to pick up the pieces.
Freelance writer Richard T. Jameson, a Queen Anne resident, is in the National Society of Film Critics. He can be reached at qanews@nwlink.com
