Spring Subway (Aks: Kai wang chun tian de di xie)

Running Time: Mandarin China/2002/color/ 35 mm /93 min

Production: Electric Orange Entertainment Co.

Director: Zhang Yibai

Writer and producer: Liu Fendou

Cinematography: Zhao Xiaodong & Gao Fei

Art Designer: An Bin, , Tian Yong

Music: Zhang Yadong

Sound: Wu Lala

Cast: Geng Le, Xu Jinglei, Zhang Yang,Wang Ning, Fan Wei, Ke Lan, Gao Yuanyuan,

Synopsis

A modern Beijing couple finds their marriage withering and communication collapsing in this accomplished independent Chinese post-romantic drama.

The urban gleam of contemporary Beijing is the setting for this soulful romantic drama of love gone cold. The twenty-something couple Jian Bin (Geng Le) and Xiao Hui (Xu Jinglei) have been married for seven years, ever since they came to the city as two wide-eyed young lovers. However, each successive year has witnessed subtle changes in their individual personalities and their relationship, with career demands, the loss of verbal intimacy and the temptations of potential lovers taking their toll. Though Jian Bin has been laid off for over three months, he fails to tell his wife, instead choosing to dress and pretend to leave for work, though he actually spends his days riding the new subway system, eavesdropping on the various stages of romances between different people on the train. Almost out of boredom, both Jian Bin and Xiao Hui begin other relationships: she with a flatteringly persistent man, and he with a beautiful, temporarily blind burn victim. The married couple lead their separate lives, unwilling to ask the painful question of whether there is any life left to their love. A sleek, lushly photographed film, Spring Subway finds director Yibai utilizing several innovative theatrical devices for this emotionally bracing story, which represents another achievement in the sophisticated new school of young Chinese filmmaking.

Comments 1

Reviewed by Shelly Kraicer at the Udine Far East Film Festival April, 2002

Spring Subway is one of the most promising recent debut features from China. First time director Zhang Yibai, who has worked in television and music video, applies his flair for flashy technique to the service of this thoroughly up-to-date offbeat urban romance set in contemporary Beijing.

Zhang, along with screenwriter/producer Liu Fendou, chose to make an officially approved picture, which makes perfect financial sense for this, the first production of the new Beijing-based independent production house Electric Orange Entertainment. With the Film Bureau's approval, Spring Subway becomes a still too rare example of an ambitious independent Chinese film. The filmmakers tread a narrow path blazed by indie production company IMAR's Crazy Love Soup and Shower, both of which were co-written by Liu Fendou. Spring Subway shows how this pathway works: it avoids major state-owned studios; can reach local audiences; therefore boasts a welcome commercial potential; and, as a bonus, retains international appeal. As such, it forms a complementary alternative to the "sixth generation" films that, avoiding the censorship approval process, can't profitably and openly be distributed within China.

Ruggedly handsome Geng Le (In the Heat of the Sun , Beijing Rocks), and currently hot mainland pop-idol Xu Jinglei (Spicy Love Soup) both do the best work yet of their young careers playing a twenty-something couple lost in the doldrums of a seven-year-old marriage that seems to be coming apart for no particular reason. Xu Jinglei plays Xiaohui, who works in a design company and is drawn to a friendship cum affair with a customer (a nice sloe-eyed turn by Zhang Yang, the director of Shower and Quitting). Geng Le plays Jianbin, who just lost his job, but maintains the pretence of going to work by riding the Beijing subway all day. There, he observes a clutch of fellow passengers in the process of tentatively falling in love. The film jumps among these different romances he eavesdrops on: a garrulously jovial pudgy baker woos the equally voluble saleswoman of his dreams; and a curiously shy slacker gropes furtively in the overhead straps with a young commuter's all-too-willing hand. Extra-marital emotional peril looms when Jian Bin finds himself drawn to an injured schoolteacher, whom he gently, though anonymously cares for as she recovers in hospital.

A sense of mute, frustrated yearning pervades the story, most of whose characters seem frustrated in their inability to express their feelings. The central couple could restore their marriage if only they could bring themselves to speak directly to each other, But their strenuous attempts to do anything but talk seem to exhaust their energies, pushing them to find companionship and love elsewhere.

Though Zhang Yibai seems indebted to Wong Kar-wai's stylistic panache and copious use of confessional voice-overs, he's no simple Wong acolyte. Clean, inventive framings constantly counterpoise the emotionally confused characters in a crisp, Ikea-furnished, polished mirror-glass world of tangible contemporaneity. The commodities all know their places: it's just the human inhabitants of Beijing's anonymously post-modern streetscapes who seem lost, fragile, insufficiently clear about who they are and what they want. Zhang is a brilliant montage-maker. He constructs playfully complex scenes (and even an entire closing sequence) out of surprising cuts and contrasts, changes in perspective. He even dares to play with alterations of speed and narrative direction that, in retrospect, seem naturally, directly expressive.

The music by Zhang Yadong (a protégé of China's finest pop singer and Chungking Express co-star Faye Wong) is superb. In no small measure responsible for knitting together the film's unusually disparate elements, Zhang's score gives them shape, a unity of texture and a mutual resonance that makes them sing.

This may be one of the most thoroughly "international" Beijing films yet. With its cappuccino drinkers and sleekly modern settings, it could just as easily be a story from any urban capital: San Francisco, Tokyo, London. Greater than the sum of its parts, Spring Subway whirls forward with a giddy rush of feeling - it's at the same time romantic and post-romantic, which should please both paying audiences and jaded critics - flaunting a new, state of the art flair for the global urban culture all its own.

By Shelly Kraicer

Comments 2

SPRING SUBWAY Review Tuesday, September 17, 2002

On my trip to Beijing I was handed a DVD of a film that does not yet exist on any radar screens anywhere that I’ve seen. It is not listed on IMDB and I’ve seen no news about it, but it is brand new and I watched it on my flight back to the United States.

The film is called SPRING SUBWAY (aka KAIWANG CHUNTIAN DE DITIE). Watching the film having just experienced Beijing for the first time, it just was the perfect reflection of what I had experienced. A city where people, like you and me, fall in love, lose jobs, search for work and fight and kick and have all the experiences that we as human beings go through in this thing called life.

This isn’t about gunplay or martial arts; this isn’t about birds flying in slow motion. This isn’t a movie about the seedy world of the triads or the magical realm of centuries ago. This isn’t a movie that you think of when you think of films coming from this region. If it were France of the Sixties… you might expect it. Maybe Cassavetes of the Seventies, but I just don’t think you’d expect to find an absolutely heart-breaking film about the human condition between a pair of long time lovers in a DVD handed to you in Beijing while David Carradine was fighting Michael Jai White on the set of Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL.

This is a movie that recalls for me the romantic films of Truffaut, my two favorites being JULES ET JIM and THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN. I was very strongly affected by this movie, as a great deal of what is felt by the characters of this movie, I have felt too. So has anyone that has been in love and then had that love torn apart.

The film begins with a shot of actor Geng Le and actress Xu Jinglei seemingly committing suicide together. Leaping off a building top, both smiling. This is a very puzzling image as you sit there and watch, euphoric suicide? Reminiscent in a way of Butch and Sundance’s famous leap, only we never see the completion of the leap.

Instead we flash back; we discover quickly that Geng Le’s Jian Bin character has lost his job and that he hasn’t found the nerve to tell his wife. Each morning since they first arrived in Beijing they have rode the Subway together to and from work. It is part of their cycle. When Geng Le no longer has a job, his pride and personal sense of inadequacy won’t allow him to tell her. So instead he rides the subway all day long till she again rejoins him and they go home.

Each night creating a faux life, a boring and uninteresting life. The secrets, the unsaid things driving each other further and further apart. She detects the change. He feels her feeling different towards him. Neither is as open as they once were. Both holding back the information that the other needs to understand what is going on with the one they love.

Geng lives through the other people on the Subway; there was a middle aged man that was excited about a blind date that went terribly wrong. There’s the nervous teenager and the girl that always stands near him, but neither ever talking to one another though their thoughts never leave each other.

Meanwhile in Xu Jinglei’s character’s life she meets a man that is as open with her as her husband used to be. He is that friend she once found in her lover. She spends time with him that she conceals from her husband, fearful of his jealousy. The relationship is completely platonic, but who believes in that these days?

The characters begin suspecting things of one another, avoiding the conversations, hinging whether or not they’ll talk on a mental game upon the movements of a cockroach. Anything to take responsibility from talking with one another. There are three sets of couples in this story, but one primary story being told. I won’t go deeply into the situations or how things turn out. What the significance of the opening shot is or how any of the three would be romances end.

I will tell you this, the movie is absolutely smart beyond words. An adult relationship with all the briar patches, thorns and problems that go hand in hand. I found the film to be an absolute delight. The director, Zhang Yibai has really captured the modern Beijing that I experienced to a ‘T’. This is his first feature film and so another wondrous talent joins the ranks of Asian Filmmakers.

It is a shame though that the film will likely go undistributed in the rest of the world, as it isn’t from an established director and stars up-coming stars from the region, but there is very little for foreign distributors to feel safe with, what with the lack of action and martial arts. God forbid we get just a wondrous story of love, anger, frustration, pride and beauty… Maybe if they dubbed it in French… sigh…

Seek out this film, it’ll be harder than most to find, but if you have a heart that beats and yearns for completion, this movie is a full cup to whet one’s lips upon.