E-Mail This Article to a Friend ZHOU YU’S TRAIN

In Zhou Yu’s Train, director and co-screenwriter Sun Zhou presents us with a annoyed Gong Li. Here, as the title character, the actress who illuminated such Fifth Generation hits as Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou makes her way by smashing vases and turning her back on fireworks. She’s a ceramicist torn between two lovers. One, a distracted poet played by Tony Leung Ka Fei (the other Tony Leung), lives in distant Chongyang; Zhou Yu travels to meet him twice a week. The other, a regular-guy animal doctor (Sun Honglei), lives nearby. The movie, like a film from the 1930s, admirably insists that a train is an all-purpose love metaphor. Train-set scenes break up the otherwise turgid melodrama, which, with its slo-mo borrowings from Wong Kar-wai movies like In the Mood for Love, plays like a Fifth Generation epic retooled for either 21st-century China or a Hollywood remake with Diane Lane. Zhou Yu’s Train instructs with the simple message that poets are sad, veterinarians are happy, and ladies must make their choices and suffer the consequences. "Movies are the train, not the station," said Jean-Luc Godard; this one is a long wait on a hard bench. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (97 minutes)