The Mumpsimus Blog site: The Mumpsimus Blog site -> Zhou Yu's Train

It's always difficult to watch a film from another culture, in another language, and get the fullest depth from it. Subtitles never carry the inflections, the meanings. And they distract from the visual imagery, sometimes forcing the viewer to choose between dialogue and image. It can be an unfulfilling, frustrating experience.

Zhou Yu's Train is one of those films. It comes with shades and subtleties you can sense, rather than experience. It has suggestions, rather than solidity.

It's a story with layers. On one layer is a rather straightforward love story, vaguely sensual, with hints of random passion, about an independent young artist who falls in love with a poet who lives in an abandoned library. But the two seem so disconnected so often that it's hard to tell what their relationship is really all about. We don't get a sense they're as much in love as in lust, but even their lovemaking has a distanced, mechanical feel in the camera lense.

Another layer is about life, work and society in modern China. Most of this remains a visual layer, somewhat opaque to the western audience. There are juxtapositions between modern and ancient, natural and artificial, but they seem fleeting and inexplicable.

It's a stunning film at times, with some truly wonderful camera work, but slow, and the plot - maybe because of the language barrier - seems confused and disjointed. It slowly comes into focus at the end, and is somewhat disappointing in that it resolves into the ordinary as opposed to the magical. There is no personal redemption, no epiphany, no personal journeys to discovery. And in the end, no resolution.

It's a love quadrangle, but most of the time it's a triangle of mundane proportions. People collide more than interact. The main characters seem aloof and studied - too often scenes that could potentially be emotionally charged are mere flickerings of static. There's no sense of empathy built around the characters. Even Gong Li, very attractive but playing a capricious woman, fails to draw much viewer support.

The film progresses at a languid pace, with no great expectations or events as landmarks in its geography. Overall, by the end it leaves the viewer wondering what it was all about.