Once a leading light among China's famed Fifth Generation filmmakers, a group that includes Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, director Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief) has been absent for the decade since 1993's The Blue Kite earned him a yearlong ban by the Chinese government. So it's fitting that his return would be a remake of Fei Mu's 1948 melodrama Spring In A Small Town, which was shelved and forgotten as "rightist" by the Communist Party, and was later recognized as one of the country's greatest cinematic achievements. Though Zhuangzhuang's remake doesn't appear to have political overtones, making the film was in itself a political act, paying luminous homage to a fellow traveler who was also left to twist in the wind.
Set amid the ruins of a South Chinese village in 1946, after Japanese bombing runs have crumbled the city walls and decimated the population, Springtime In A Small Town surveys the wreckage from without and within. On the razed grounds of his ancestral estate, Wu Jun lives like a tired old man in a 30-year-old's body. Suffering from a hacking cough that he almost hopefully attributes to tuberculosis, Wu and his wife Hu Jingfan have survived eight years of an arranged marriage, but the two occupy separate beds and have given up any thought of rearing children. When Wu's old friend Xiu Baiqing, a charming and worldly doctor from Shanghai, arrives for a long visit, his presence temporarily energizes the household, but circumstances change with the revelation that Xiu and Hu share a romantic past and still have feelings for each other.
Under the keen eye of cinematographer Mark Li Ping-bing (In The Mood For Love), who shoots through confining windows and frames, Springtime has the suffocating intensity of great chamber drama. In some respects, Tian keeps the emotions too bottled up, encouraging a hermetic atmosphere that seems more like a formal exercise than a setting for unrequited, flesh-and-blood passion. But the rigorous approach pays off in the subtle code of manners, where a single innocuous line can send all three characters reeling toward a heartbreaking destiny. Unlike other period dramas about repressed affections, Tian focuses as much on the spurned husband as the secret lovers, which muddies the audience's sympathies and allows for a more balanced treatment of the situation. In the end, their feelings of bittersweet regret are equally shared.