Springtime in a Small Town

This film is so painfully slow I could only take it in 20 minute bites over the course of a week or so. There is so much wrong with it I don't know where to begin.

The main thing, I think, is the married woman, who is required to comport herself throughout the film with such preternatural stiffness and sparseness of movement that her character quickly becomes fairly detestable. I began to dread her appearance, knowing that I would have to spend a full minute watching her turn her head a few degrees.

In fact, the director's main device was to turn all three main characters into zombies to reflect their inability to act decisively - a fairly facile technique that soon became irksome and led the film into an endless and repetitive dramatic bog, from which the limited acting talent on display was not able to lift it. It was all a very poor imitation of Chekhov.

The only scrap of interest I got from the film was the reflection that given the historical context of China at that time, the characters, with nothing better to do than degenerate into effete self-indulgence, were already virtually walking ghosts. No doubt historical events soon put them out of their misery. And not a moment too soon.