Snowflower and the Secret Fan
Wayne Wang
The story: As little girls in early 19th-century China, two sworn sisters have their feet crushed and bound so that they would walk daintily and marry well. Over the years, Snowflower (Gianna Jun) and Lily (Li Bingbing) secretly communicate by writing on silk fans. Their relationship is echoed in the friendship between their descendants Sophia (Jun) and Nina (Li) in modern-day Shanghai. Adapted from American novelist Lisa See’s 2005 novel of the same name.
The lot of women in Chinese history has not been a happy one. In a strongly patriarchal society, they were expected to be subservient and to know their place.
As a matchmaker observes, marriages are arranged according to men’s reasons but laotong, or sworn-sister, relationships are for women’s needs for emotional comfort and support.
The idea of adding a modern-day parallel relationship to the film is a potentially intriguing one given how gender roles and social mores have evolved.
But Chinese-American director Wayne Wang, probably best known for his 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, disappoints.
He is not helped by screenwriters Angela Workman, Ronald Bass and Michael K. Ray, who produce a leaden and unconvincing script. The dialogue is painfully stilted and filled with portentous sounding lines: “We are all women, we were born to leave our families” and “Disobedience is a woman’s greatest sin.” Not surprisingly, hardly anyone comes across as a flesh-and-blood character.
It is hard to believe that these characters are who they say they are to each other. Snowflower and Lily are meant to have a deep-hearted love for each other, as are Sophia and Nina, but Gianna Jun and Li Bingbing cannot summon that depth of feeling.
In particular, South Korean actress Jun, from the hit comedy My Sassy Girl (2001), seems rather vacant at times – you wonder if she was fully aware of what was going on.
And then Hugh Jackman turns up as Sophia’s love interest and attempts to serenade her in unintelligible Mandarin.
What is obviously missing in the film is an exploration of the sapphic element in female friendships. There are some hints of this and while one could argue that this was something not plausible in 19th-century China, it does not make sense for there not to be at least some mention of it in the modern-day storyline.
Moreover, instead of trusting the audience to grasp the past-present parallels, Wang cuts back and forth in a heavy-handed manner to underline his point.
Not only is the big picture askew, the smaller details are off as well. For reasons unknown to the audience, Li Bingbing, as Nina, switches distractingly between Mandarin and English even when she is conversing with other Chinese people in Shanghai.
The denouement that finally rolls around hinges on some convenient discovery, but by that point, one is barely invested enough in the story to be incensed.
(ST)