Starring: Li Bingbing, Gianna Jun Ji-hyun, Hugh Jackman, Jiang Wu
Directed by: Wayne Wang
Category: IIA (Putonghua and English)
A textbook example of how not to transfer a novel to the screen, this twin tale of sisterly love in olden and present-day China manages to take the ingredients that made Lisa See's novel a best-seller and cinematically 'expand' them into modern banality. In a misguided attempt to give the source material contemporary relevance, director Wayne Wang needlessly transforms the original yarn, set entirely in 19th century Hunan, into a subplot that serves as counterpoint to a trite 21st century Shanghai melodrama.
It is a concept that might have succeeded if not for a supposedly innovative angle, concocted by a team of scribes including Wang's Joy Luck Club collaborator Ron Bass, that turns out to be staler than the narrative's antique elements. The movie's freshest aspects were in fact extracted from the novel, particularly the focus on nushu, a phonetic alphabet used exclusively by women conversant in a local dialect of Hunan's Jiangyong county. It is this calligraphy, featured prominently on the titular fan, that is the main means of communication between the sworn sisters Snow Flower (Gianna Jun of My Sassy Girl fame) and Lily (Li Bingbing, above, with Jun, top), members of starkly different social classes who use nushu to communicate their innermost thoughts when separated by the vicissitudes of life during the Qing dynasty.
As if this strand was not enough to fill 100 minutes of screen time, the director relegates it to secondary status in recounting the mawkish travails of Shanghainese go-getters Sophia and Nina (also played by Jun and Li, respectively, chatting stiffly in English).
Whether as trendy professionals on the edge of 30, or in flashbacks to high school days in 1997, the two confront problems that seem trivial and soap opera-ish in juxtaposition to their Qing dynasty counterparts.
The scriptwriters' futile attempts to turn Sophia's linguistic inability in Chinese into a riveting plot device end up feeling so contrived that it makes the foot binding endured by Snow Flower and Lily appear natural by comparison. Take away the modern framework, and the production displays considerable skill. Even the relationship between Snow Flower and Lily resonates intermittently, with the scenario concentrating on pertinent matters and cast members discoursing in Chinese, albeit not in the appropriate dialect and, in Jun's case, dubbed by a different actress.