This lyrical masterpiece is one of the great films of Chinese cinema, though it is unaccountably little known outside China. Based on a Taiwanese novel recalling writer Lin Haiyin’s childhood as a young girl in 1920s Beijing, the film is director Wu Yigong’s paean for an irretrievably lost world, for a China whose past is now only accessible via a heartsick, fragmented, anaesthetised memory. The entire film is seen through the eyes of Yingzi, an eleven-year-old living with a scholarly (and, it is implied, politically progressive) father and mother in a lane in old Beijing. Her wide-eyed innocence, unquenchable curiosity, and naively confident busybody zealousness involves her, with sometimes unintentionally catastrophic results, in three sequential stories: the tale of a young madwoman and orphan who live near her; an encounter with a friendly thief who inhabits a vacant lot next door and the domestic heartaches of her family’s maid. Wu’s gaze, identified with Yingzi’s, is precise, mobile, and supple. The film’s elegant restraint and classical refinement are perfectly balanced, exquisitely modulated. Restoring the elegant sentiment of his spiritual predecessor, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, Wu insists on art’s redemptive powers of restoration and consolation in the face of irretrievable loss. (SK)
