Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

shinyboots The film was very slow and unassuming through the first 1/2hr. The acting was melodramatic. I was getting bored. Watching more, I found that the earlier scenes created the atmosphere so key to the film. In a sense, "April is the cruelest month" is the backdrop that Li Ping and Tian set. The tension between the characters is really elevated above narrative dotage when Li Ping allows a character to wordlessly express turmoil and or the pent-up emotions that they have been suppressing for so long. The earlier melodramatic sequences represent an homage to the most popular Chinesenarratives of the midcentury, when displaying raw emotion was left not to violent screams or gritty dialogue, but to the calculated scenes where characters said very little.

Harry T. Yung SpoilersAn alternative title of this film could have been the one for a recent local play in town: 'Tiny ripples in still waters' (as literally translated. 'Still waters' obviously have nothing to do with the fictitious rock band featured in 'Almost Famous'. It just means a dead pool).This film reminds me immediately of the Italian gem Facing Windows I saw recently in Toronto, for which my comments started out thus: 'The ripple-in-a-mundane-life type of story is difficult to handle'. Both films deal with a stagnant marriage, and the ripple created by the intrusion of a man. The circumstances are however different, but I am not going to start comparing and contrasting the two. For Springtime, the main cause of the marital problem is the husband's (Liyan) lingering ailment. His home-coming childhood friend (Zeichen) turns out to be also the wife's (Yuwen) teen sweetheart. The only two other characters are Liyan's little sister, just turning 16, and a faithful old manservant.The pace is slow but the film is absorbingly mesmerising. Behind the deceptively simple dialogue is an undercurrent of ebbs and flows of emotions, particularly in the case of Hu Jingfan playing Yuwen. (Look beyond the surface of the words she speaks into the subtly varying tone, the nuances, and the ever so slight shift in the timbre of her voice). Masterly use of a slowly panning camera creates the melancholy mood sustaining the intriguing lure of the film. Particularly worth mentioning is the brilliant climax of the 'drinking' scene. I won't spoil it with inapt descriptions. If Hu Jingfu's performance has been subtle hitherto, it's sparkling in that scene.Film critics in town who have seen the original 1948 version claim that it is even better. Hope to get a chance to see it. In any event, this re-make is well worth recommending to those who have the capacity to appreciate.* * * *Update - March 2005.Have now seen the original, which certainly lives up to its reputation, but can't agree with the verdict that the remake is inferior.

Ralph Michael Stein [See IMDb main page for this film for cast names-none are known outside China]"Springtime in a Small Town" is director Zhuangzhuang Tian's re-make of the 1948 film of the same name, an intense and rare example of Chinese film-making from that turbulent time which few have seen.The time is after the Japanese surrendered and before Mao drove Chiang to Formosa. In what was once a munificent villa, saved from utter destruction after a Japanese air raid by a fortuitous cloudburst, the Young Master, Liyan, lives with his wife, Yuwen and his sister, Dai Xiu, a perky teenager on the cusp of womanhood. They are served by a faithful family retainer, Huang.Liyan appears ill with a persistent hacking cough and he alternately consumes and refuses herbal medicines. Into this domestic scene arrives, after a ten-year absence, young doctor Zchichen, a boyhood friend of Liyan and, as it turns out, a fellow who knew Yuwen before her arranged marriage. Quick examination by the novice M.D. reveals what most viewers would have already suspected: Liyan is a pitiful hypochondriac whose self-absorption drove his pretty wife into a separate bedroom long ago.What follows is the growing mutual attraction of Zhichen who harbors long held deep feelings for Yuwen and the woman's awakening awareness that her marriage is a sham: she knows she made a mistake by not leaving with Zhichen a decade earlier.This is a story told largely through dialogue between the three protagonists. A few scenes have them gamboling outside the compound but only one, with a number of teenagers, is actually in the nearly burnt out village. An amusing rowboat outing has the group singing in Chinese to the tune of "The Blue Danube."This being a Chinese romance of sorts, moral values and not simply fear of the censor restrain Yuwen and Zhichen's gnawing passion for each other. They suffer all the pain of deep guilt with none of the offsetting pleasures of carnal consummation.The story, by itself, is neither unique nor totally absorbing. I felt like yelling out to Liyan, "Hey fellow, stop this pretense of being very sick and get your house in order before you no longer have one." But I behaved.There is a political coda to "Springtime in a Small Town" that very many Chinese won't miss and neither will foreign viewers acquainted with modern history. For a start, at the beginning of the film a title-board expresses Tian's regard for the Chinese film-makers of 1948 who produced the original version. That establishes a link with a past that has a a gaping interruption, an important albeit quiet statement by this fine director.In all cultures with sharply varied seasons, spring is always seen as a time of renewal for both man and nature. That point is elegantly portrayed in the current, beautiful Korean film, "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring." Movies, literature and even classical music celebrate spring as a time of hope and regeneration (and it's not for nothing that the hit song in the musical and movie, "The Producers," is "Springtime for Hitler :) ).As "Springtime in a Small Town" ends Liyan and Yuwen tend a garden emerging from winter. However hopeful their outlook, any knowledgeable viewer knows that they will shortly face public accusation, humiliation, self-abnegation, loss of property and - not unlikely - death by a People's firing squad as bourgeois landowners. Their spring will be followed by a deadly political winter and Tian subtly reminds the audience that the next chapter in China's postwar history is one of repression and pain.A common enough love triangle before a deep and depressing chapter of a great people's imminent descent into chaos and even mass madness. This film is a healthy indication that China's film industry is slowly recovering.8/10

zzmale Master of contemporary criticism, the director tried to continue his work despite the setback of Blue Kite (Lan Feng Zheng, 1993). It was nearly ten years since his last movie, Blue Kite and this time, the director is forced back to the old cautious approach of using old China to mask the criticism of the contemporary China.The major theme behind the movie, is that everyone knows that something is not right and something needs to be done, but nobody does anything significant, and things are back to the way it was. This theme is the reflection of current China, and the member of its regime: everyone knows reforms needs to be speed up and deepened but nobody does anything and things are just the way it was, if no worse.