MOVIES

'Springtime' again for Tian

Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's last film got him blacklisted. His return vehicle is decidedly nonpolitical.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

May 28 2004

The last time Tian Zhuangzhuang made a feature film, it got him blacklisted by the Chinese government. In 1992, he directed "The Blue Kite," the tale of a spunky child and his family who are torn asunder by Mao Tse-tung's Great Leap Forward experiment in collectivization.

The story mirrored some of Tian's own experiences. As a teenager in the late '60s, he'd been deemed an uncooperative Red Guard and was sent to the Chinese countryside to be "reeducated" by peasants. Raw footage of "The Blue Kite" was smuggled to a Dutch company and eventually earned international acclaim after it screened at Cannes. At home, government authorities suspended Tian's filmmaking activities for a year.

But in Tian's just-opened movie, "Springtime in a Small Town," there's no political subtext. "I'm not very sensitive about politics," Tian said, speaking from New York through a translator. "In this film, there are no political elements at all, only the simple story of these three persons."

Set in 1946, a few months after the defeated Japanese army has withdrawn from China, "Springtime in a Small Town" takes place amid the bombed-out ruins of a country estate where an ailing aristocrat lives with his depressed wife. Their unhappy marriage is disrupted by a surprise visit from his old college friend who turns out to be the wife's ex-lover.

"Springtime," a remake of the 1948 Chinese film "Spring in a Small Town," may bear the markings of a classic soap opera triangle, but Tian applied an exceptionally austere sensibility to the proceedings. "Springtime" was filmed on a 600-year-old estate dating to the Ming Dynasty. To reinforce the otherworldly hush that permeates his drama, Tian insisted that all power generators be at least 400 yards from the set. "The relationship between the three characters is kind of unclear. Each of them has love for each other and has a responsibility to each other. Anything they say, anything they do, must be done very carefully and quietly."

"I mainly wanted to give a kind of feeling of distance," he explained, "to get across the idea that people who see this movie are observing the lives of people so far away, 50 years ago. That's why I used no close-ups."

Tian was inspired to remake the story in 1999, when he came across a videocassette of "Spring in a Small Town" by director Mu Fei. Mu, denounced for being a right-wing reactionary, died in exile three years after completing the film. Tian, who'd reentered the film industry as a producer after his "Blue Kite" banishment, was so enthralled that he watched the film dozens of times in a matter of days and decided to remake it.

"It's a story that looks inside the hearts of three persons," he said. "I think most adults have similar feelings or experiences in their life."

Tian came of age creatively at the Beijing Film Academy with a group of classmates who would come to be known as the Fifth Generation. When the school reopened in 1978 after being shut down for 12 years, Tian and his classmates gorged on Western cinema.

"When we entered the academy, for four years we had the chance to watch about 1,000 foreign films," Tian recalled. The curriculum included Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up," Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," Francois Truffaut's "The Four Hundred Blows," Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," Terrence Mallick's "Days of Heaven" and Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon."

"All these films have some influence on our later productions," he said. Tian's Fifth Generation classmates included Zhang Yimou, who would go on to make "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Yellow Earth," and Chen Kaige, who made "Farewell, My Concubine."

Tian gained his own international following in 1985 with "Horse Thief." Filming on location in rural Tibet, Tian used local tribesmen who were not professional actors.

Chinese authorities were not pleased with his depiction of Tibet's Buddhist rituals and primitive nomad culture, but overseas, critics praised Tian's command of cinematic language.

Then came "The Blue Kite" and the ensuing ruckus. "Even now, I still cannot understand why 'Blue Kite' brought me such troubles," Tian said. "To my understanding, that movie does no harm at all to either the Chinese people or the Chinese government."

Tian said he's been rejuvenated by his work on "Springtime" and has already finished "Delamu," a documentary about isolated peasants living an ecologically threatened way of life in the Nijian River Valley along the border with Tibet.

He sounds guardedly optimistic about the prospects for unfettered creative expression in his homeland. "Nowadays," he says, "Chinese filmmaking is more open. It doesn't mean you can do whatever you want, but compared to before, I believe it's going to keep getting more wide open."