The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 29-July 5
Springtime in a Small Town (2002)
Directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang
For more than thirty years the great cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing has worked on films from his native Taiwan—including ten indelible features directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien—while also teaming with filmmakers from France, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. He has developed an intimate, elegant, observational method of shooting in response to his moment’s filming conditions and in sympathy with the actors responding to it with him. He recorded the cloistered Chinese film Springtime (a noble-minded remake of Fei Mu’s 1948 treasure) with a rolling one-scene/one-shot approach that allows the melodrama’s characters ample room to express themselves as they explore the outermost grounds and most private rooms of a dilapidated country estate only recently bombed by Japanese planes. It is in this postwar setting that an urban young doctor (played by Xin Baiqing) comes to visit an ailing former schoolmate (Wu Jun) and discovers the man’s wife (Hu Jingfan) to be a long-lost and never-vanquished flame. While the estate master comes to entertain with hope the thought of his wife reuniting with her true love, the place’s mistress herself, struggling over her feelings, tries to transfer the doctor’s affections to another. At the time of Springtime’s shoot, Tian had (largely for political reasons) not completed a film in nearly a decade; the lead actors with whom he chose to work were all making their screen debuts. The cinematographer responded to uncertain conditions with grace and gentleness, encasing a tale of volatile emotions within smooth, flowing frames and soft, glowing light. Aaron Cutler (June 30, 7:30pm at MoMA’s Mark Lee Ping-Bing series)