Zaochun eryue (Early Spring)
Xie Tieli, CN 1963; Screenplay: Xie Tieli after the novella February by Rou Shi; Cinematography: Li Wenhua; Editing: Qi Yuling; Music: Jiang Dingxian; Cast: Sun Daolin, Xie Fang, Shangguan Yunzhu. DCP (from 35mm), color, 120 min. Mandarin with English subtitlesDespite the early PRC's strict film censorship, some films managed to keep the humanitarian spirit of Shanghai cinema's Golden Age alive. One was Xie Tieli's exquisitely ambiguous Early Spring. In the 1920s, a young urban intellectual, Xiao Jianqiu, arrives in an eastern Chinese village to teach at a local school. Imbued with the idealism of Republican China's revolutionary movements, he brings his sensitivity to a complicated situation. As Xiao grows close to the family of a poor widow whose husband he used to know, he grows even closer to vibrantly independent Tao Lan, the principal's sister (played radiantly by Xie Fang, who also stars in Two Stage Sisters). Tao is a freethinker and a free spirit (her only belief is in "individualism"), seemingly a perfect spiritual match for Xiao. The film's ending and its blatant absence of Party-identified heroes was controversial at the time: it was labelled a "poisonous weed" during the Cultural Revolution. (S.K.)