Springtime in a Small Town is the latest offering from one of China's great Fifth Generation directors, those artists who mined the horrors of the Cultural Revolution to devastating cinematic effect in the mid-'90s. The screaming mobs at political purge sessions, the heaps of classical texts burning in the streets, the hollow-cheeked famine that resulted from Mao's Great Leap Forward policy -- this world on fire was the backdrop for films like Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine, Zhang Yimou's To Live, and Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite. The sense of scale was thunderous, with the characters struggling like ants against the inexorable machinery of ideology and the state, and more often than not, they barely survived.
In his first film in nearly a decade, Tian has largely turned away from the conflagration of modern Chinese history, which had brought him no end of trouble. In 1989, he was blacklisted for signing an open letter to the government that advocated for the release of political prisoners, and his Blue Kite was banned for its uncompromising take on China's revolution.
Springtime in a Small Town stands in contrast to Tian's earlier work. A remake of a classic 1948 film by director Fei Mu, Springtime is a story of duty and illicit love told in exquisite miniature. Yet Tian hasn't completely lost his political edge. At the beginning of Springtime, he flashes a message: “With this film, the producers wish to pay their respects to China's pioneering filmmakers.” This homage to the past may seem a simple enough act, but for a country that had long sought to eradicate its prerevolutionary history, it has its own subversiveness.
The film has a deceptive simplicity, centered on five actors and a ruined, once-opulent house staffed by only one loyal old servant. Liyan (Wu Jun), the young master of the house, suffers from a mysterious ailment that has estranged him from his melancholy wife, Yuwen (Hu Jingfan). Liyan's exuberant young sister provides the sole spark of life -- until an old friend of Liyan's stops by for a visit. Zhang Zhichen (Xin Baiqing) is a handsome, sophisticated doctor who upsets the stifling order in Liyan's household. He may be an old friend to Liyan, but he is an even older friend to Liyan's wife.
Set just after World War II, Springtime has much in common with period pieces like Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. As in those films, an anguished heart beats beneath the corseted confines of propriety and good manners. Tian has exercised an even more severe restraint than the other directors, however; he restricts his movie almost entirely to Liyan's decaying house and the crumbling rock wall where Yuwen paces like a lovelorn ghost. Scale is just as important as it was in the earlier, grandiose films of the Fifth Generation, but used here to opposite effect. Liyan and Yuwen are trapped in their closed-in lives; for them, springtime brings only the unchanging half-light and stuffy air of a sick room.
Films centered on both desire and repression must strike a careful balance. Tip one way and risk a florid sentimentality; tip the other way and wind up with a tasteful but dead dried-flower arrangement. Springtime flirts with that art-house desiccation: The shots are composed with painterly control, framed by branches and windows, and the characters' despair telegraphed through the most mundane of words. Tian's technique is a miracle of subdued beauty -- a palette of blue to reflect a character's depression, a woman dusting a window, a man reflected in the glass watching her with undisguised pain. But at times, I wish that Tian had let loose a little more, shown more of those gasping moments that are the staples of the doomed love story. Haynes had a Sirkian hypersentimentality to draw upon, Wong used the riotously blooming colors on dresses worn by his character, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), to express her hidden love. Tian puts much of the heat of the film into a single drunken episode, but the scene doesn't provide enough fuel to enliven his impeccable composition. His actors pace out their stagy blocking, Zhichen steps right up behind Yuwen with menacing desire (actor Xin is a great loomer), but the film can sometimes seem like a bit of a pretty snooze.
Springtime is clearly the handiwork of a master, created with a depth of consciousness and attention that shines through in every scene. Lights flicker, one on, one off, as Yuwen and Zhang Zhichen enact a complex dance, pushing and pulling at each other. Opposing forces form an uneasy equilibrium: Liyan's house has been left standing only because torrents of rain saved it from going up in flames after a Japanese bombing raid.
I wish at times that Tian had taken his film right to the brink of destruction, as he does Liyan's house, uncontrolled passion only just drowned out by sorrow. Tian's film is still a wonder, but had the director stoked the flames higher, as he has in his past work, perhaps Springtime would have fulfilled the promise of ardent life -- and not just its entrapment -- in its title.
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
