Critic Reviews

Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.

An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.

For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

A meditation on literature, love and remembrance that is able to find humor and hope in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.

It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.

Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.