Lovers in The Water: the Waving Dance with Purity

A film sketching moods and sensations more than anything concrete, Lovers in the Water follows a dying young man who quits his job in Chongqing and goes back to his hometown of Youyang, where he remeets by chance a woman from his childhood. It\'s a story built out of several familiar building blocks of melodrama-Terminal Disease, Lost Love, Scenic Settings, A Dab of Ethnic Minority Culture (here, the "waving dance" of the Tujia that forms the film\'s Chinese title)-that sidesteps being melodramatic. That\'s partly because directors Zheng Zheng and Chen Fu just let the characters go about their business without over-exoticising the setting (a typical old small town in Southeastern Chongqing municipality) or even fully developing all the emotion implicit in the relationships and themes outlined in the first half-hour.

The 30-something man-played in a neutral, low-key style by Li Xueqing-meets family and old friends, reopens his late father\'s small restaurant, bumps into a woman he once had a relationship with, and comes close to having a new relationship with a dance teacher he knew when she was a kid. All of them seem keener to re-establish friendships with him than he is with them. And the film thus becomes one about continuing loss (time moves on, people pass away), but with a curiously untragic flavour. The man holds his secret from almost everyone and seems at peace with himself, more so than those around him. It\'s an original idea that the filmmakers never push beyond its fragile limitations, and is all the better for it: in its emotional delicacy the movie sometimes recalls the purity of Zhang Yimou\'s recent Under the Hawthorn Tree. As the Tujia dance teacher with a troubled backstory, actress Shang Hua is suitably graceful but a little bit wooden compared with the rest of the cast, all of whom blend naturally into the setting.

 

By Derek Elley