Lovers in the Water played SIFF, avoids melodrama

Lovers in the Water (擺手舞之戀)

China

Contemporary melodrama

Directed by  Zheng Zheng (鄭正), Chen Fu (陳富)

http://www.filmbiz.asia/reviews/lovers-in-the-water

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By Derek Elley

Wed, 22 June 2011, 13:30 PM (HKT)

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Emotionally delicate drama of a dying young man visiting his hometown avoids obvious melodrama. Asian events.

Story

Chongqing city, China, the present day. After some temporarily successful treatment, the terminally ill Tan Bingjian (Li Xueqing), 30, discharges himself from hospital, leaves his job, and returns by coach to his hometown of Longtan, in Youyang municipality, during the New Year holiday. At a rest stop, one of the passengers, young Liao Yun (Shang Hua), faints in the toilet and on arrival Bingjian has her examined by a doctor friend, Zhao Qiang, who says she is weak from an abortion a few days earlier. Liao Yun turns out to be someone Bingjian once knew in his hometown when she was a young girl; later, she left for Chongqing to perform the Tujia ethnic minority’s “waving dance” in the big city, where she met club owner Huang Xinzhong (Shang Yubo). She has now returned to her hometown to teach dance. Bingjian stays with his mother and his younger sister Xiaoxuan (Xin Yi’na) — who’s about to marry — and remeets old friends, including Wang Tianling and a woman he once knew, Lu Yan, who is now divorced and has returned with her young son. Bingjian reopens his father’s small snack restaurant, and he and Liao Yun spend time together and grow close, though he hides the secret of his illness from her and others. After the sudden death of Zhao, Bingjian starts to avoid Liao Yun, and then Huang arrives, claiming Liao Yun broke her contract with him.

Review

A film sketching moods and sensations more than anything more concrete,  Lovers in the Water (擺手舞之戀) follows a dying young man who quits his job in Chongqing and goes back to his hometown, where he remeets by chance a woman from his childhood. It’s a story built out of several familiar building blocks of melodrama — terminal disease, lost love, scenic settings, a dab of ethnic minority culture (here, the “waving dance” of the Tujia 土家 that forms the film’s Chinese title) — that sidesteps being melodramatic. That’s partly because first-time feature directors Zheng Zheng (鄭正, founder of Chongqing Independent Film & Video Festival) and Chen Fu (陳富,a documentary filmmaker) just let the characters go about their business without over-exoticising the setting of a typical  zhen (old small town) in a southeastern Chongqing municipality or even fully developing all the emotions implicit in the relationships and themes outlined in the first half-hour.

The 30-something man — played in a neutral, low-key style by model Li Xueqing (李學慶) — meets family and old friends, reopens his late father’s small restaurant, bumps into a woman he once had a relationship with, and comes close to having a new relationship with a dance teacher he knew when she was a kid. All of them seem keener to re-establish friendships with him than he is with them, and the film thus becomes one about continuing loss (time moves on, people pass away) but with a curiously untragic flavour. The man holds his secret from almost everyone and seems at peace with himself, more so than those around him.

It’s an original idea that the filmmakers and scrīptwriter Ying Liang (應亮) never push beyond its fragile limitations, and is all the better for it: in its emotional delicacy the movie sometimes recalls the purity of Zhang Yimou’s (張藝謀) recent  Under the Hawthorn Tree (山楂樹之戀). As the Tujia dance teacher with a troubled backstory, model-actress Shang Hua (尚華, from the 2008 comedy  Lao Wu’s Oscar 老五的奧斯卡) is suitably graceful but a bit wooden compared with the rest of the cast, all of whom blend naturally into the smalltown setting. Production credits are strong, with textured photography by Chinese-American d.p. Jeffrey Chu 朱志剛 ( Tabarnak,  Stand by Me) and delicate scoring by Zhang Xiao (張驍).