A modest young girl in early 20th century Shanghai submits to an arranged marriage with a wealthy stranger who, after the wedding, is revealed to be blind, asthmatic, and crippled with polio, and the rest of her life is all downhill from there. Some of the sudden shifts forward in time may be hard to follow (the film spans nearly 50 years in the lives of its characters), but Fred Tan's assured direction gives the story an elegant, almost epic sweep, adding some chilling (and at times morbidly funny) moments to what, in less sensitive hands, could have been an absurdly melodramatic Oriental soap opera. Tan's screenplay is totally unsentimental and not entirely sympathetic, finding just the right degree of detachment to show the corrupting influence of ancient traditions on an earlier generation of Chinese women, turning the beauty of the fable slowly but surely into a heartless beast.
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