Zhou Yu's Train boils down to a tale of two lakes, one real and the other imagined. Gong Li, the ravishing Chinese beauty from Raise The Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine, has to choose between two diametrically opposed partners: Tony Leung Ka Fai, a mysterious, inscrutable poet who writes poems from a run-down apartment walled with books, and Honglei Sun, a down-to-earth veterinarian with more conventional ideas about romance. Susceptible to purple verses, Gong swoons over a Leung poem that compares her to a lake in Xian Hu, but when she and Honglei go searching for it outside a train station, all they find are fields shrouded in fog. Later, when Gong rebuffs Honglei's invitation to an elaborate lakeside party, he responds, "I know my lake is artificial, but at least it's full of water."
By those standards, Zhou Yu's Train is an empty lake, drained of any tangible substance and refilled with wispy, pseudo-poetic metaphor. Owing much to the fevered, impressionistic style of Hong Kong contemporary Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love), director Sun Zhou has made what could pass for a Wong parody: Elliptical editing? Check. Excessive use of slow motion? Check. Voiceover narration from a doppelganger who exists in some parallel universe or the not-too-distant future? Check. Yet there's a world of difference between Wong's dreamy, intoxicating reveries and Sun's middlebrow imitation, just as there is between a great poet and the arty, tortured fop played by Leung.
The film's title refers to the long, biweekly train rides that Gong takes from Sanming, where she paints exquisite porcelain vases (presumably for symbolic value, as much as practical), to Leung's apartment in distant Chongyang. Her steadfast love is rewarded with the sort of erratic, hot-and-cold reception expected of an artist, but she keeps making the journey, even after circumstances lead him far out of the city. During one of her frequent fainting spells, Gong meets the disarmingly silly Honglei, who indulges and woos her insistently in spite of her powerful feelings for Leung.
To confuse matters unnecessarily, Gong appears in a dual role as a young woman with cropped hair who appears inspired by Leung's self-published poetry book, though little else is revealed about her. Sun mixes the second Gong into the scrambled-up chronology, but to no apparent purpose, other than doubling the repeated glamour shots of the actress strolling across the frame. Returning after a long absence, at least from North American screens, Gong possesses the same impenetrable aura that made her the face of China's famed Fifth Generation, like the Eastern equivalent of Catherine Deneuve. But even transcendent beauty can't transcend everything.