CNN STYLE — “I’m living in a small town, living a life where nothing changes,” a woman says in a mournful voice as the camera follows her walking towards a house that is partially destroyed and almost uninhabitable.
Her marriage is falling apart as well. World War II left the family financially ruined and her husband depressed, neurotic and stuck in the past.
“We never say more than a few words to each other,” she says. “I have no courage to die. He seems to have no courage to live.”
This portrait of despair opens Fei Mu’s black-and-white 1948 film, “Spring in a Small Town,” a study of frustrated desire and marital strife.
Regarded today as a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, “Spring” was released months before the Communist Party’s victory in the country’s bloody civil war, and its fate would be a harbinger of what was to come.
James Griffiths 