A very good movie

To be honest, it has been a while since I have seen this flick and, if I recall correctly, I saw it in England in the movie theater when I was living there at the time. Back then, I wasn’t really familiar Zhang Yimou’s work (in fact, even today, I still haven’t watched his best movies) but since the guy had a really solid reputation, I was really eager to check one of his movies. Eventually, I was quite impressed and I liked this movie a lot. It is actually funny that, a year later, Ziyi Zhang will get her breakthrough with ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ and she will be involved in many kung-fu movies later on her career but, in fact, her acting debut had nothing to do with martial-arts at all (in fact, she is not actually a trained martial artist). Coming back to our main feature, it is a simple tale taking place in the Chinese countryside in the 40’s if I’m not mistaken. Basically, it is a rather straigtforward love story but Zhang Yimou is quite a story teller and I thought the whole thing was quite spellbinding to watch. To conclude, even though it is pretty much forgotten nowadays, I thought it was really good and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Asian movies.

8/10