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.
