Spring in a Small Town

The war is over. The town wall is broken and a family lives in its ruined house. Liyan is ill; he feels ill and rarely leaves his bed. His wife Yuwen runs the house, buys the medicine, walks on the wall. There has been no talk between them for years. One day there is a knock. Zhichen is a doctor and Liyan's old friend. Yuwen knows him; before the war the two of them loved each other. The house now holds four. Nobody says anything and everybody knows. Fei Mu directs. Wei Wei plays Yuwen. It is a Chinese production, made in 1948. The narrator is the woman herself; her inner voice speaks from inside the scenes and at times steps outside what we are shown. The film fell out of view for a long time after 1949 and was reassessed in the eighties. In a poll held at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005 it was chosen the best Chinese film of all time. Tian Zhuangzhuang remade it in 2002. The matter it treats is not desire but restraint; the characters know what they would do and do not do it. The camera moves little and the scenes are held long; the broken walls work inside the narrative. Its limit is pace; there is almost no event, the narrative is confined to five people, and the watching asks for patience. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Chinese cinema and quiet drama. Who it is not for: it is very slow, the surviving print old, and the ending still.