HEAVEN ETERNAL EARTH EVERLASTING

Derek ELLEY is Chief Film Critic of "Film Business Asia." Elley has been writing about East Asian cinema for over 35 years, especially Chinese-language films, and has arranged numerous seasons both in the U.K. and elsewhere. In 1998 he co-founded the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy, devoted to mainstream Asian movies, and prior to joining "FBA" was senior film critic of U.S.-based entertainment trade paper "Variety".

 

Writer Li Fangfang\'s first picture (from her own novel) is one of the latter: at heart a long-limbed melodrama, charting the ups and downs in the life of its protagonist, Shen Xingchen, from the age of 11 to 27 and through the will-they-won\'t-they story of her relationship with fellow high-school student Ming Yuan. As the Chinese title clearly states, this a  was focusing on social stability and economic development. For this generation the markers are moments of disaster or pride (the 2003 SARS epidemic, the 2008 Olympics) or simply those with a special signifiance to young people (the 2003 suicide of Hong Kong actor-singer Leslie Cheung).

 

Li\'s script packs an enormous amount of incident into the film\'s 105 minutes, and its structure could easily have supported a longer running time to allow some of the supporting characters more development (Shen\'s friend Du Zihao, plus her uncle and his second wife, etc.). It\'s a highly managed script, which is just a little too clever for its own good in its later scenes, but the final twist - which shows how the protagonists are bound by a deeper fate even they don\'t realise - ends the movie with a punch.

 

Unusually for a writer adapting her own material, Li has paid meticulous attention to the technical side, with superb widescreen photography in Hangzhou by young American d.p. Lyle Vincent (also making his feature debut) and saturated colours (strong on blues) that increase the movie\'s emotional resonance. It\'s simply great to look at (without becoming stagey), packed with small detail (especially in the close-up inserts used in the first half) and atmospherically underpinned by the gently pulsing musical score of Lin Hai (Letter from an Unknown Woman, Sunflower).