A time and emotion study

Spring may be the season in Tian Zhuangzhuang's chamber drama, but the mood is wistfully autumnal. What remains of an affluent mansion stands in a Chinese country town which retreating Japanese invaders in 1945 left with mortared walls.

Even larger, and likely not to be healed so swiftly, are the gaps in the lives of the household. Yuwen (Hu Jingfan), a young wife, is bored, tempted by the distant whistle of the passing train to Shanghai, but resigned to a numbed ennui and her embroidery frame.

Already, she is sleeping apart from her older husband, Dai Liyan (Wu Jun), who believes himself dying from TB, though it is more likely that he has been devitalised by war. The only hope for his posterity is his 16-year-old schoolgirl sister, Xiu (Lu Sisi).

Into this barely animate scene of suspended animation - Chekhovian in feel down to the faithful old retainer (Ye Xiaokeng) and photographed in tones of dawn and twilight that glow on the remaining beauties of old porcelain and delicate glassware and hold the characters in a penumbra of their own loneliness - comes an unexpected visitor.

Zhang Zhichen (Xin Baiqing) is a young doctor, at one time Dai Liyan's schoolmate and Yuwen's boyfriend. The ailing husband sees the chance to continue his family line, if Xiu will marry Zhang.

But his young wife's suppressed emotions have been released by the stranger's arrival; she has hankerings of

her own. Springtime in a Small Town became a Chinese film classic when Fei Mu first adapted Li Trianji's short story for the screen in 1948; he and it were later reviled as "reactionary" by Mao's communists. Tian's new version is an assiduously respectful homage, yet a new work of art in its own right.

It's less stylised than the original, but, except when the doctor is teaching children after school to waltz to the Blue Danube, it pins down the emotions with sombre austerity. What holds you every minute are the tensions of a story whose surface appears as unruffled.

There are only two moments of "disturbance": Zhang's impulsive clutch at the wife after sake has relaxed everyone's self-constraint, and an outburst of quiet desperation inducing Yuwen to smash the glass screen behind which the rattled doctor has retreated.

These incursions of impending, but never consummated, violence are like unexpected spring thunder. The end is a return to the beginning ... the departing train ... the sad whistle ... the embroidery needle drawn in and out. The film seems to hold its breath to the last second of running-time.

Springtime In A Small Town
Cert: PG