As this year's anniversary celebrations wind down, I'd like to talk to you guys about one of my all time favorite films, Zhang Yuan's Green Tea. I've found that not many people talk about this film, though relatively speaking it had a DVD release in the US back in the day. Critically I don't see a lot of coverage about it, either, so I understand that my views on the film may be an outlier. But out of all the Asian romantic movies I've seen, this one really sticks out to me. Probably aside from Song Hae-sung's Failan (2001) and Shunji Iwai's Love Letter (1995), this film is my favorite Asian romance, because it really isn't a romance in the normal sense.
Green Tea starts with an encounter between Chen Mingliang (Jiang Wen) and Wu Fang (Vicki Zhou Wei). The former is a recent divorcee who was dumped for someone else; the latter is a rather uptight research student whose one job in life seems to be to piss off every man she dates. Chen, however, is immediately smitten and begins to meet up with her regularly. Things become complicated when Chen meets another woman, Lang Lang, who flips the entire situation on its head.
The film's greatest asset is cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who transforms an already good movie into a great one. Doyle shows us Chen and Wu behind windows, colored plastic and glass partitions; he lingers on lips that sip, hands that feel and eyes that steal glances. We're eavesdropping on these two characters, and you know it. The visual feel of the film is sensuous, even though the film doesn't have a single kiss or sex scene. In this regard, Jiang Wen manages to
balance his performance and frame him as a person desperately seeking
for connection instead of as a weird stalker. Zhao Wei's performance here is my personal favorite, as she exudes mystery and allure without even trying.
The first thing one immediately notices when watching the film is that it's composed mainly of small talk. Sure, it's probably the most interesting small talk you will ever hear in a while, but these are conversations that are mostly about nothing. I remember some of my own long, rambling conversations with people over dark, somber nights like we see in the film, and I remember eventually falling in love with some of these people, essentially over nothing. And that's partly where I am most enamored with this film: it's a love story about that exciting, giddy moment between the tentative state of having fallen in love and the state of seeing that same love reciprocated; an ambiguous, purgatorial state that's neither here nor there and is very difficult to describe. It's breathtaking, even in a metaphorical sense - I liken it to holding one's breath in excitement. This is a film that finds beauty in that space of nothingness between loving and being loved.
Green Tea lingers in ambiguity, leaving you tantalized. One of Wu Fang's stories is about her friend's parents: the mother is a beautician for the dead, whose secrets eventually wreck her relationship with her husband. It's unclear if Wu Fang is telling the truth, embellishing it for dramatic effect, or if she's outright lying. For all we know, she might be talking about her own parents rather than someone else's. This uncertainty permeates every frame of this film until its very last sequence. Here, we are told through the film's final frames, like swirling tea leaves settling down on the glass, sometimes all we have to do is damn it all, seize the moment, and exhale.
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