In a small town, housewife Zhou Yuwen (Jingfan Hu) and her husband Dai Liyan (Bai Qing Xin) lived a normal but boring life. Dai Liyan was suffering from severe depression, after the loss of his family's fortune during the war. When a young doctor, Zhang Zhichen (Jun Wu), an old friend of Dai Liyan and ex-lover of Zhou Yuwen, comes to visit them, the young couple's life will never be the same. Meanwhile, Dai Liyan's younger sister Dai Xiu (Si Si Lu) begins to fall in love with the charming doctor.
Special Agent Matti
*
PG (Adult themes)
116 minutes (1:56 hours)
Film: 25 September 2003
When I started discussing the remake with Ah Cheng, the first thing we decided was to change the narrative perspective. Fei Mu presents the story from the woman Yuwen's point of view, and uses her voice-overs to bring the character close to the audience. I think it's his way of actualising the hardships of the time. But history has moved on and we felt that a present-day audience would need more distance from the characters and story.
We also aimed for more naturalistic performances; the acting in Fei Mu's film is very close to a stage huaju tradition, a little too stylised for today's viewers. And we made some significant changes to the character of Dai Liyan. My own feeling is that Dai Liyan is not physically sick at all: I think his condition reflects the effects of the war and his sexual problems with his wife.
If he really were a sick man, it would change the dynamic of the entire story; the struggle between him and Zhang Zhichen for Yuwen's affections would be hopelessly unequal. In our version, we have Dai Liyan offering to withdraw from his marriage to allow Yuwen to be with Zhichen. Our Liyan is much more active than Fei Mu's.
There's one other aspect to this. Fei Mu made his film in conditions of great hardship. He had a very limited budget for costumes, locations, set building and so on. We didn't set out to make a big-budget film ourselves, but we did have the resources to approach the themes and characters with more subtlety. We could find visual ways of suggesting the family's history, the changing relationships and so on.
All three of the leading actors are quite young, and two had never acted in a film before.
I wanted to build up a relationship with them, and to give them a chance to develop the characters, and so we convened before the start of shooting to rehearse the whole script at length. People nowadays think and behave very differently from people in the late 1940s, and so it was important to help these young actors find their way into these characters. They also had to carry the burden of following Fei Mu's actors in these roles, and I couldn't let them imitate their prototypes in the old film.
The hardest role to cast, obviously, was Yuwen. That was a big worry from the start: could we find anyone to equal Wei Wei in the original? I remember Ah Cheng recommending that we should not go for anyone who was strikingly beautiful. We needed someone very normal, very average, whose hardships and bitterness would be credible. The audience should discover her beauty gradually, not be struck by it from the moment she walks on screen. It was difficult for Hu Jingfan, who had no previous experience in movies, but it also put great pressure on me.
I needed to have great faith in my actress.
We made all those carved doors ourselves and fitted them. The backyard had been used to keep pigs and cows, and so we had to clean it up before we could build the pavilion.
I personally planted the new grass!
We shot the old town walls at Fengyang in Anhui Province. There aren't many old perimeter walls like that left these days. This particular wall was built by the farmer who went on to become the first Ming Emperor. He moved to Nanjing before it was finished, and then later to Beijing; no-one has ever taken proper care of it since then. I saw the wall when I happened to be in Anhui two years ago, and thought of it again when the film came up. Looking at that wall was one of the things which gave me the confidence to feel I could make this film.
We had difficulties at the start of the shoot. The sound recordist's father went down with cancer; the actors took time to get into the rhythm of the filming. We ended up throwing away our first ten days' work and starting again – and everything went very smoothly in the following forty days.
I've always had strong feelings about the kind of film I want to make, and commercial considerations have never played much part in my thinking. I've always aimed to produce something beautiful which will have lasting value. My personal nervousness about this project has been mitigated to some extent by showing my rough-cuts to film professionals here in Beijing. They've commented that there hasn't been a film like this one in China for so many years...
Making this film, I've honestly felt that I was learning from Fei Mu. It felt like communicating with a master. I saw his original film so many times, and never stopped learning from it. That's what made it possible for me to restart my career as a director.
Interview by Tony Rayns, translated by Hao Li (Beijing, 20 January 2002)
For more than three decades, Fei Mu's Spring in a small town was a forgotten film. Fei Mu moved to Hong Kong soon after making it, and died there in 1951. He was later reviled as a "rightist" by the apparatchiks who wrote the official history of Chinese film for the Communist Party, and none of his films was deemed important.
This picture began to change only in the early 1980s, when the China Film Archive re-opened (like other institutions, it had been closed down during the Cultural Revolution) and made a new print from the original negative of Spring in a small town. The film quickly found a new and admiring audience. Many Chinese critics - especially in Hong Kong and Taiwan - consider it the greatest Chinese film ever made.
Fei Mu has since been honoured with a retrospective at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Stanley Kwan's film Actress (aka Centre stage, 1991), a bio-pic about the 1930s star Ruan Lingyu, features Fei Mu as a character and goes out of its way to rehabilitate his reputation as a man and as an artist. And critic Wong Ain-Ling has edited a comprehensive (Chinese language) study of Fei Mu's life and work, published in Hong Kong.
Tian Zhuangzhuang has not directed a film since The blue kite, shot in 1991 and completed in 1992. This remake of Fei Mu's classic marks his return to active service as a director. During production, the project was visited by the only surviving member of Fei Mu's cast: Wei Wei, the original Yuwen. Tian now presents his film as a homage to Fei Mu and the other great pioneers who gave China its own cinema.