Not even bad in a good way

just watch it!

A different way of telling a story

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Many have commented on how confusing the film's plot is, and I agreed on first viewing. A second viewing, however, shows everything quite intricately and deftly and =coherently= composed. People are used to films telling them things with words, which a visual medium doesn't necessarily have to do. The images give you everything here, provided you're paying attention, which shouldn't be too much for a director to ask. The first 20 minutes play out almost like a silent movie, as Lou uses the most delicately suggestive fragments to introduce us to the star-crossed lovers Itami (Toru Nakamura) and Cynthia (Zhang Ziyi). Zhang, in my opinion, deserves every close-up she gets.

Lethargic direction ruins an otherwise compelling period story that stars the wondrous Zhang Ziyi, in an excellent role as a woman who joins an extremist group in 1928 China, just prior to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and reunites with a former lover who is now working for Japan. Every bit of drama and forward motion of the story is sucked dry by director Ye Lou's somnambulist directorial style. Characters stand still staring at each other for long minutes, saying nothing, hand-held cameras hold forever on faces showing interminable reactions way longer than they need to, edits repeat the same reaction is triple redundancy. We know nothing about the characters as the story begins and are given little new information as the story progresses, only silence and static shots of lovers who don't speak, who interaction through silent dances but share no apparent emotional intimacy. A very sleep inducing film.

Saw Purple Butterfly in NYC the beginning of December. I missed Xiao cheng zhi chun or Springtime in a Small Town by director Tian Zhuangzhuang shown there in early May. Quite likely Springtime is the better movie of the two by a wide margin. It's based on an earlier Chinese film according to J. Hoberman of the Village Voice: "Fei Mu's 1948 Springtime is widely regarded as a masterpiece-some consider it the greatest of all Chinese films. Never having seen it, I can only imagine how Tian may have annotated the original in his remake. The second Springtime is predicated on a sense of '50s film-making (not unlike the heightened Sirkness of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven) that could hardly have existed in the original. Even as homage, Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave." Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the Fei Mu Springtime as "widely considered the nation's greatest film by Mandarin speakers but tragically neglected by almost everyone else" and ends his capsule review of the new Springtime, "This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same." I no doubt need to add this to my 2004 "Wish I'd Seen" list. (Thanks to my colleagues on another film world website for bringing it to my attention in the House of Flying Daggers thread there).Well, it's clear to me that Purple Butterfly isn't of this magnitude but it's notably different from the usual Chinese film fare in focusing on political conflicts in the 1930's -- which are handled in a somewhat conspiratorial and noirish way, with romance woven in. There are lots of long stares, Thirties dance songs, non-filter cigarettes pensively lighted with box matches, and events in Shanghai in the period of Japanese occupation leading up to the Sino-Japanese war involving political activist plots and counter-plots that are filmed to look rather like blurry, chaotic versions of Chicago gangster shootouts. There is a tragic star-crossed love story, and the climactic scene is rather neat. But the director, Lou Ye, isn't satisfied but has to add a disenchanted brutal sex/self doubt coda.The director's previous film was Suzhou River, and this is just as pretty to look at -- pretty enough so you almost don't care that at first you don't know what's happening, except that couples are inarticulately in love and it's always raining. The Village Voice thumbnail review aptly commented, "part action flick, part love story, and part posh historical pageant...a fabulously morose piece of work." Purple Butterfly calls a bit too much attention to itself to fully evoke its Thirties setting, but it manages to seem original most of the way despite occasional debts to Wong Kar Wai notable in the long pauses, languid love scenes, and incessant rain. Not a great success, but watchable as a mood piece.Metacritic score of Purple Butterfly: 66.Metacritic score of Springtime in a Small Town: 86.

Did anybody succeed in getting in this movie?It's a total mess to me: a vague historical/sentimental context instead of a plot, a pretentious imagery as mise en scene and it lasts two hours!Shame on those who wasted money here.