When word began to circulate about mainland Chinese drama Jasmine Women back in 2003 and 2004 it seemed the sort of film guaranteed to make waves internationally. It is, after all, based on a well regarded novel and features an all star cast built around Zhang Ziyi and Joan Chen. But, for whatever reason, the film simply slipped off the radar and has been seldom seen until now with a new Chinese DVD release making the film widely available.
Told in three segments spanning three distinct time periods Jasmine Women casts both Zhang and Chen in multiple roles as it tells the stories of three generations of of an all female family and their very poor choices in men. The first segment casts Zhang as A Mo – the only character who recurs through all three segements – with Chen as A’s mother, while Chen taking over the A Mo role in both the second and third segments with Zhang playing A’s daughter and grand daughter, respectively.
The film opens in the early thirties, the jazz era in full swing. A Mo is a bright eyed young girl, working with her mother in their family photography shop while obsessing over the movies. When she catches the eye of a lecherous film producer A Mo moves away from home to become an actress against her mother’s wishes and seems well on the road to success when the Cultural Revolution strikes, effectively destroying the film industry and leaving A Mo abandoned, unemployed, pregnant and with no choice but to move back home with her disapproving mother.
The second segment jumps forward slightly more than twenty years to the early fifties. A Mo – now played by Chen – still lives in the apartment over the photography shop, now with her daughter Lily (Zhang). Chinese communism is in full swing and the young Lily has fallen in love with a university classmate, a working class communist party member, who shares a mutual dislike with A Mo. Following a fight with her mother, and with a wildly over-romanticized view of the working class life, Lily leaves home and marries her young love against her mother’s wishes only to receive a rude awakening on lower class life.
We then jump forward in time again to the seventies with Lily’s daughter returning home from an extended time away living in the countryside, during which time she was secretly married to a man about to head to a far away university.
The strength of Jasmine Women is very obviously the attention to period detail and the recreation of these distinct times. The opening segment, in particular, is gorgeously detailed and beautifully shot, many sequences very strongly reminiscent of the old MGM musicals. This was a vibrant time period lovingly recreated and there are much worse things in the world than looking at Zhang done up in period glam. And while the later two pieces may not be as flashy as the opening salvo they are also recreated with a remarkable attention to detail.
Unfortunately the film’s weaknesses are also immediately evident. As you may gather from the above synopses the storylines in all three segments are highly repetitive, the film essentially repeating variations on the same scenario in three different time periods. The characters never seem to progress and little effort being made to differentiate the different characters either of the main actresses play. Perhaps lying at the root of this problem is how the film feels less like a coherent narrative – an actual story about actual people – than it does a type of historical tourism, a series of events strung together more to guide you through an era than to introduce you to any particular character. Coming in at forty to forty five minutes each the individual segments aren’t long enough for any sort of extended character development but are long enough to bloat the total running time to two hours and ten minutes, which is far too long for a film that repeats itself as often as this one does.
The mainland Chinese DVD release is pretty much what you would expect from the Zoke Culture DVD label, which is to say not particularly good. Presented in a letterboxed widescreen format the transfer is soft and noticeably grainy with high contrast elements tending to bleed out somewhat. And while the subtitles give enough to follow the story with little effort they are definitely of the “Engrish” variety – poorly translated and littered with grammar and syntax errors.