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Zhou Yu's Train

2002, Movie, PG-13, 97 mins

Zhou Yu's Train: Review

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Based on an acclaimed Chinese novel and starring two of China's biggest movie stars, director Sun Zhou's curious love story is nevertheless more confounding than romantic. Painter Zhou Yu (Gong Li) uses her extraordinary talent to decorate vases and bowls for a ceramics factory in Sanming, a town in northwestern China. One afternoon while riding a train, Zhang Jiang (Sun Hong Lei), a handsome young veterinarian, offers to buy the lovely vase Zhou Yu is bringing to her lover, Chen Ching (Tony Leung Ka-fai) as a gift. Zhou Yu refuses to sell, and when Zhang Jiang flirtatiously refuses to take no for an answer, she deliberately drops the delicate object onto the floor of the train, smashing it to pieces. This sudden, inexplicable act triggers a lengthy flashback to Zhou Yu's first meeting with the shy poet Chen Ching at a dance where he wrote her a short poem before disappearing. Luckily he accidentally left his bag behind, so Zhou Yu is later able to track him to the city of Chongyang where Chen Ching lives in an old library. Despite the considerable distance between their homes, they embark on a torrid affair. Each weekend, Zhou Yu takes the train from Sanming to Chongyang; between bouts of lovemaking, Chen Ching writes love poems to his newfound love. But even though Zhou Yu is devoted to seeing his work one day in print — she organizes a public reading and later uses her savings to help him self-publish his first collection, "Zhou Yu's Train" — she senses that she's become little more than an irritating distraction. When Chen Ching finally confronts her with his plans to take a teaching post in Tibet, Zhou Yu storms out. On the train back to Sanming, she meets Zhang Jiang, the veterinarian, who tends to farm animals far out in the countryside. But Zhou Yu resists his romantic overtures; though Chen Ching has given her the brush off and soon leaves for Tibet, Zhou Yu is still in love with his poems. Writer-director Sun Zhou (who previously directed Gong Li in the 1999 drama Breaking the Silence) toys with reality, diving deep into the romantic fantasy that what's real in the human heart trumps reality every time. But like Zhou Yu's shattered vases and chipped bowls, the film's fractured chronology resists efforts to reassemble it. And while the film's erotic symbolism is surprisingly obvious — all those trains and tunnels! — it's otherwise bafflingly vague. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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