Zhou Yu's Train

Product Description

Twice a week, Zhou Yu (Gong Li, Farewell My Concubine), a beautiful artisan, takes the train to faraway Chongyang, where she indulges in a torrid affair with Chen Ching (Tony Leung Ka-Fai, The Lover), her poet-lover. United by their passion, he finds in Zhou the ultimate muse, while she believes Chen to be her ideal soul mate. But accompanying Zhou on her long, lonely train rides are two individuals who threaten to derail her romantic idyll: Zhang Qiang (Sun Honglei, The Road Home), a young doctor hopelessly obsessed with her, and Ziu (Li, in a dual role), a mysterious young woman who bares a striking resemblance to Zhou and seems to be following her every move. A passionate tale of onewoman's search for perfect love, ZHOU YU'S TRAIN is a evocation of distance and time, reality and imagination, where the only thing that's truly real is what's in one's heart.

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Every so often, the convoluted love story Zhou Yu's Train seems to stop in its tracks and succumb to rapture, gazing on the disarmingly beautiful face of actress Gong Li. A young painter named Zhou Yu (Gong Li, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad) falls headlong in love with a painfully shy poet, Chen Ching (Tony Leung Ka-Fai, The Lover). Twice a week she takes the train to his town to be with him, even though he's bewildered by her near-obsessive passion. On the train, a wise-cracking veterinarian (Sun Honglei) pursues Zhou Yu, but she resists his emotional directness. Zhou Yu's Train bounces back and forth, not only between these two romances but also in time, to confusing effect. But there's something compelling about Zhou Yu's need to love the version of her lover that she holds in her mind, and that sustains the movie through its muddled moments. --Bret Fetzer