At last year's Venice International Film Festival, Italian master director Bernardo Bertolucci called Perpetual Motion "an amazingly new Chinese movie." And other viewers have seen the all-woman movie as destined to shake audiences out of their preconceived ideas about women's roles in China.

 

A press screening at Golden Harvest cinema Tuesday left Shenzhen reporters debating what they'd seen. Some said the movie is totally different from other Chinese art-house films.

 

"It's unbelievably fantastic," He Baidan, a reporter from Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, said. "The lines are rich in humor and have deep meaning behind them. The four women's language is provocative, ironic, and violent. Their personalities are rebellious and fascinating. The myth of the feeble, submissive, unselfish and sexually repressed Oriental women is shredded in this film."

 

However, some reporters thought that with the action confined to one room, the movie was too much like a play, and rather dull in execution. It lacks the atmosphere needed to make it a powerful movie.

 

 

Ning Ying, the director, as well as the leads Hong Huang, Liu Suola and Zhang Hanzhi, are all prominent and influential Chinese women. Hong Huang, the daughter of Mao Zedong's English interpreter Zhang Hanzhi, is a celebrity in the Chinese media and publishing business, while Liu Suola is an acclaimed novelist and musician. Hong is also the ex-wife of leading Chinese director Chen Kaige, and recently mocked Chen in her blog over the notorious Bun copyright infringement case.

 

Three of the four leads are making their acting debuts.

 

Ning Ying worked as an assistant director on Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). Her feature directorial debut was Someone Loves Just Me (1990), followed by I Love Beijing (2001) and the documentary Railroad of Hope (2001).

 

(Shenzhen Daily March 2, 2006)