There is
Something exciting about leaving everything behind
There is something
Deep and pulling leaving everything behind
Something about having everything
You think you'll ever need
Sitting in the seat next to you
Springtime in a Small Town (2002):
(1) There is something terribly sensuous about watching a woman beautifying herself at her vanity table. Here, I'm thinking of not just Yuwen in front of her mirror, preparing herself to appear before her husband, before the family guest, before her ex-lover, but also Zhang Ziyi in 2046, parading in her cheongsum to the music of some sultry, oddly fitting Spanish samba. I still do my face, put on my makeup etc in privacy, which I used to call "putting on my warrior paint", heralding yet another awful, soul-destroying day at work in a very much hated office. Now that I have more time and leisure (clearly, since I keep blogging and watching movies!), dressing up has instead become sensual, anticipatory, almost hedonistic. Watching Yuwen in the film, I felt again that slow revelation - growing, like her, in my own awareness of sensuality, indulgence, the sheer exhilaratory power of skin-deep beauty.
(2) There is also something terribly tragic in watching skin-deep beauty fade and die (as it is wont to do, botox notwithstanding). Compare Yuwen at the beginning of the film, preparing herself to meet Zhang (the family guest who turns out to be her ex-lover), and later in the film, when, half-drunk, she looks at her mirror (so coveted by her sixteen-year-old sister-in-law, oblivious to the fact that her beauty lies not in the admiration of her captured reflection but in the unseen ephemerality of her youth). We don't know exactly what she sees (though we might have a good idea) - but whatever she saw caused her to make the snap decision to see Zhang that night and give way to their rekindled passion which she has repressed for so long (whether they did or not is another matter - I'm not giving spoilers here). Deleuze speaks of the pure time-image - well, how's this for a time-image: when you stand in your last year of your womanly youth and look at yourself in the mirror, and in a single flash you know exactly how quickly time is speeding by.
(3) There is something incongruously scary about how such frankly uninspired acting from an entire cast can still result in a story that makes us care and feel so much. Kudos to the director - for surely no one else deserves the credit.
(4) There is something indescribable about place when captured in films. I loved the wild countryside, and especially the broken houses (from the war), the old city wall. Zhang Yimou's country landscape is often flat, uninspiring and harsh, as cruel as the conditions of its inhabitants (as is frequently his theme). Tian Zhuangzhuang's countryside is simply stunning - the still river (but what's with the singing of "The Blue Danube"?? In Mandarin??), the wild gorges, the blooming flowers. The broken walls remind me of Pasolini's Accattone, but more forcefully (due to the association with history) of Rossellini's Rome Open City and Germany Year Zero, films in which neorealism was waxed lyrical about how historicity was apprehended on film with the camera's stark capture of the bombed out buildings, the broken streets, the shrapnel, the remnants of war. Memory indeed lives in place, in walls, in locality. And that, I firmly believe, refutes Deleuze's concept of the "any-place-whatever" - the disconnectedness, emptiness of place which so informs Antonioni's modernist films.
And because memory endures in place, place endures in life. And thus the last shot of Xiao cheng zhi chun, after the disturbing element (the ex-lover, Zhang Zhichen) leaves. But unlike the leaving of the stranger in Pasolini's Teorema, who leaves behind a world of chaos, an entire family turned upside down, Zhang leaves behind a domestic situation as placid as when he arrived. He passes like a ripple across the still river through which the family rowed the second day he arrived - the water bobs, then settles back into stillness. Liyan, the husband, continues to fret, Yuwen takes up her embroidery at her customary window - the state of their marriage no different from before, no better, no worse, their relationship no warmer, no colder. Butterfly Boucher's song is about uprooting, about moving on, about heading for a new world, awaiting adventure, or disaster, but definitely a experience that is guaranteed to be new. But not so in this xiao cheng. Things will continue as they always had, as they always have, as they always will. And thus the closing shot of the ancient city walls - permanent, enduring, changeless, constant, perennial, every bit as profound as the final shot of the church dome at the end of Rome Open City. Bravo!!!
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