Green Tea

Wu Fong (Zhao Wei, also known from Shaolin Soccer), is a clever young student and bookworm, who always consults the green tea leaves when she first meets a man. So she also does this when she has a blind date with the dissolute Chen Mingliang (the well-known Chinese actor going Jiang Wen, director of Devils on the Doorstep). But this coffee drinker derides her ritual and says he already knows all about what there is to know about women. Despite this disappointing first encounter, more follow, meetings in which the two come closer together or at least find common interest, in which she is reticent and he is macho. Chen meanwhile has more need to prove his manhood and thinks he has found his prey in the exuberantly dressed and compliant Langlang (also played by Zhao Wei). The necessary vicissitudes ensue... Zhang Yuan, whose films are well known for their realistic, almost documentary style, certainly takes a different path here. Helped by the striking photography of Christopher Doyle (whose camerawork can also be admired during the festival in Ashes of Time) he presents a colourful, impeccably lit series of scenes, in which male-female relations are shaped in a fresh, intimate and occasionally slightly comic way.