Springtime in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun)

• 
  
  October 29, 2007

  columbiatch

  Plotwise it's sort of a cross between In the Mood for Love and Days of Heaven. So at the heart of it is a love triangle. I am usually biased against stories involving love triangles, and a lot of this film has the same things that I dislike about the situation, but it succeeds in...( read more) subtly presenting believable characters that you can relate to unlike say Jules and Jim, so overall it didn't bother me as much as I thought. The lush cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-bin and the brilliant use metaphors like with Tian's previous film The Blue Kite does make it one a cut above your average melodrama. Since this is a remake of a 1940s film the narrative style is pretty old fashioned. I went to watch this thinking that I would see the original film, often hailed as the greatest Chinese film ever, hopefully I'll see that on DVD someday.

  Share This Review
• 
  
  July 3, 2007

  jsd35

  One of my freinds got bored by this. It's slow, and its subtle. but I loved every minute of it. It's a tale of unspoken love.

  Share This Review
• 
  
  October 11, 2009

  mvieaddict

  
  Springtime in a small town was a slow movie.The set was beautiful and I was really waiting for something special to increase my inte...( read more)rest in this movie but it never happened. The movie was boring, it only had 5 people in the movie and it was almost two hours long which was totally unnecessary. Most of dialogues were slow and meaningless. The movie tone was also dark,which felt so depressing to watch. I know this was a remake of a 1948 version, which I heard the original version was way better.My problem with Springtime was despite the beauty, there was no depth to the story.

  Share This Review
• 
  
  July 6, 2007

  falcons84

  What an awkward, clumsy mess of a film with so much potential to be as quietly beautiful as In the Mood For Love.
  
  I first heard about this movie when reading about ITMFL, hearing that the original 1948 version had inspired the themes in my moody favourite film. Had heard ...( read more)good things about Tian's Blue Kite, and the director of photography is the same guy who shot most of ITMFL, so I was really excited to see this movie. It starts off promisingly too, with a gorgeously forlorn few shots of unhappy housewife Yuwen wandering in a foggy country landscape and then to her sad little home with her sickly husband Liyan whom she doesn't love. There are a few scenes I think are quite beautiful, notably an intriguing little one where Yuwen, Liyan, Liyan's little sister and their new/old friend Zhichen are rowing a boat while Little Sister sings a Chinese version of the Blue Danube, an oddly happy song about blossoms in spring considering the mistily sorrowful landscape surrounding the group. Liyan's journey from moody and frustrated, to increasingly happy, to self-sacrificing and depressed, is also quite well-done and subtle, and he is perhaps one of the most sympathetic characters in the movie.
  
  But oh, where shall I begin with the faults in this? My biggest beef is with Hu Jingfan's mannered and unnatural Yuwen, whom I feel would have done best if she had not spoken or moved very much. While I get that it's possible she simply found it difficult to express herself, resulting in that stiff, one-expression demeanour, but even in her scenes with childhood sweetheart Zhichen and when she starts to open up a little to him, she seems oddly acted, like those characters in TVB melodramas. As well, the direction of her scenes with Zhichen is terrible, with the two of them moving in a manner reminiscent of soap operas (she faces the camera, speaking to him over her shoulder, he comes up behind her in apparent anguish, etc). The crying's pretty bad too, and doesn't help to shake the feeling of bad TVB melodrama. I suppose she's slightly more sympathetic in her scenes with Little Sister, allowing herself little smiles and loosening up a bit, but I still found her awkward rather than simply repressed.
  
  My next problem is with the direction: for such a quiet movie, it is oddly restless, with the camera moving rather unnecessarily (I thought) rather than letting each scene breathe. The most jarring cut is the one after Yuwen wanders out onto the wall again (can't remember the exact placement in the chronology but it's the scene used in the DVD menu?); it seems like Tian couldn't just stand still and allow Yuwen to wallow in her grief a bit before going "OK, let's go!" Now, I'm not one to favour overt stillness, but even then, it seemed like the pacing of shots could have been much slower in this type of setting. The scene where Liyan discovers the attraction between Yuwen and Zhichen also sucks in terms of direction, starting off well with that subtle change of expression on his face, then becoming awfully maudlin as Liyan rises and is stuck in the middle of the frame, soap-opera-style once again, as if to draw unnecessary attention to something which didn't require it.
  
  Springtime... reminds me of Flowers of Shanghai in its somewhat theatrical setup, but where Flowers... was beautiful in its play-like manner (despite being a bit too slow for my tastes), Springtime makes one painfully aware that you're watching something artificial. The dialogue is terribly unnatural, and the blocking is that kind of awkward moving about that you associate with a small stage rather than a movie set. Lines are recited in that amateurish, pausing way that is necessary in a play to make things clear to a faraway audience, but simply seems exaggerated here. A good example is Little Sister, whose annoying perkiness is caricaturish and exactly what I'd expect and would enjoy on the stage. But this is FILM, a medium which demands subtlety in many occasions.
  
  I could go on. (POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT) I guess I can end by saying that the ending was rather well-done, with everything going back to what it was at the beginning, except that plaintiff train whistle and Yuwen's startled reaction reminding us that there is always that hold on her heart. That whistle was a revelation to me too, because I had thought it merely to be flute music playing in the background, and then I realized that that train and call of the outside was constantly haunting Yuwen.
  
  Disappointing.

  Share This Review
• 
  
  August 29, 2009

  waika0505

  not as good as the 1948 version

  Share This Review
• 
  
  November 20, 2008

  ArnoldPizzey

  The movie concerns a tragic emotional triangle between Zhang Zhichen, a successful doctor, who, on returning from Shanghai finds that his long lost sweetheart Yuwen, has married his best friend in his absence.
  That his best friend, Dai Liyan is a bit...(read more) of a passionles...( read more)s, malingering whinger (whom, we are given to understand, is somewhat lacking in the trouser department) is, I think, supposed to tip our guilty sympathies toward the unrequited pair. However, there is no lingering eye contact, no haltingly emotional dialogue, no inadvertent contact, in fact no telegraphing of emotion of any kind between the friend and the wife. Yumen recites her lines as if they were a shopping list, and Zhang Zhichen seems to be reading his off the back off his eyelids. This peculiar lack of chemistry between the erstwhile lovers means that for me at least, this movie never gets off the ground. This is a real shame, as it is almost impossible to find fault with the LOOK of this movie.
  The cinematography is absolutely spot on, establishing shots are just where they need to be, povs are perfect, the lighting reveals where it should and creates pools of shadow for the actors to move in and out of. Slow pans through densely textured interiors, alternately obscuring and disclosing, give an almost vertiginous sense of solidity and depth to the stage upon which the actors perform. That the actors dont seem to know how to convey the intensity and recklessness of true love upon that stage is the real tragedy of this movie.
  Two stars for acting, four for set design and cinematography

  Share This Review
• 
  
  March 17, 2008

  kurosawian

  Another brilliant Taiwanese achievement. Haunting, gorgeous, heartbreaking and captivating. Tian is among the finest filmmakers working today and this remake may very well be his most moving cinematic experience. True VISUAL storytelling.

  Share This Review
• 
  
  December 15, 2006

  Diyaz

  This looked and felt so real.

  Share This Review

This board looks lonely. Be the first to talk about "Springtime in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun)" !

• Bai Qing Xin
• Hu Jingfan
• Jingfan Hu
• Lu Sisi
• Si Si Lu
• Jun Wu
• Xiao Keng Ye
• Xin Baiqing
• Ye Xiaokeng

Click a thumb to vote on that suggestion, or add your own suggestions.

• 
  Fa Yeung Nin Wa (In the Mood for Love) (100%)
• 
  Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (0%)
• 
  Spring in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun) (0%)

No quizzes for Springtime in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun). Want to create one?

• Springtime in a Smalltown Trailer

• kurosawian
• metisweet
• johnathan1...
• finalfanta...
• kidland
• blueheron2
• goodbyeYu
• jstbigman

No recent headlines. Got one?

• 

  Films by Flixster Friends

  by jimbotender
  1155 Movies
• 

  See

  by excer
  288 Movies
• 

  $top cutie list$

  by annamariesalva...
  10 Movies
• 

  $top cutie list$

  by annamariesalva...
  10 Movies

No skins yet. Interested in creating one?