Zhou Yu's Train

Zhou Yu’s Train (China, 2002, 92 minutes long), PG-13.

I’m a sucker for trains. It’s my favorite form of transportation. I enjoy reading about train travel and even enjoy watching train movies. So, a few months ago, I was watching a Korean film (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring), and caught the previews of a Chinese film titled “Zhou Yu’s Train.” The preview made it look like there were lots of train scenes in the movie, so it went into my Netflix queue. Now I really feel like a sucker. Although the movie does have lots of train scenes, it’s essentially a Chinese chic-flick, but one partially redeemed by employing lots of poetry.

Truthfully, I had a hard time figuring out this movie. The star (the beautiful Gong Li) keeps showing up as two characters. In one, she’s Zhou Yu, a carefree woman with shoulder length hair, a painter of porcelain, who is torn between her love of a poet in a distant city and a veterinarian. The train is her connection to Ching Chen, her poet in Chongyang. Gong Li is also Xiu, a silent woman with short hair who keeps appearing throughout the movie. After Ching Chen is assigned to a school in Tibet, Xiu shows us at the school and Zhou Yu is killed in a bus crash (the train only ran twice a week, she should have waited instead of taking the bus!). Are Zhou Yu and Xiu the same? Or is this all a dream, some kind of mirror image (as the poetry suggests). I don’t know. The movie was confusing as it kept jumping back and forth between the poet and the vet, with Zhou Yu riding the fast moving train back and forth between lovers.

I don’t think I’d watched the whole movie, had it not been for the train. The wail of the whistle and the clicking of the rails was the glue that held the movie together and kept me watching. The photography is wonderful. The sight of the train snaking through tunnels and racing along viaducts was enchanting. The movie is in Mandarin. Despite having eaten scores of cans of such oranges, I still can’t make heads or tails out of the language. But there are English subtitles and since the dialogue is sparse, it’s easy to follow along. Thankfully, the sound of the train is universal.

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