Ripples Across Stagnant Water

Ten years ago, when he made Rickshaw Boy, veteran director Ling Zifeng began a shift from Communist propaganda cinema to much more personal film-making: idiosyncratic adaptations from his favourite literature of the '30s and '40s, centred on strong-willed, independent women, and formed by his interests in visual art, history and sexuality. Much of the present film is as vivid and youthful as anything by Léos Carax. A young woman stuck in a Sichuan backwater town at the turn of the last century marries a grocer but then openly takes a lover; can she hold her own when enemies in the community strike at her and the men in her life? The closing scenes seem choppy and over-compressed, but the film as a whole is clear-sighted, gripping and very beautiful.