When a family man drives his taxi car into the Yangtze river and his body disappears, wife and teenager son are left to take care of an injured hooker that was riding the taxi at the time of the accident. The premise is strange for a western mind. I guess the Chinese culture has its traditional ways of dealing with tort.
How the threesome interrelate is what the film is about. There are a few additional ancillary characters that are necessary for us to better understand the three principals, but the attention is on the latter. The gradually changing relations are finely observed. The son's increasing fixation on the hooker. The mother's loss of control of a son that is coming of age. The hooker's experienced observation of the people around her. It's slow placed but almost never boring.
At the end, the so far moody treatment is upset by an attempt to resolve a minor mystery that by then had become superfluous. Poor idea. It would have been fine to leave it unresolved. The tightened narrative comes close to resorting to well-used formulas and breaking up its hard won spell. As we reach the closing scenes, the film regains its composure and only hints at a solution.
The director calls his style "poetic realism". A style that feels a little bit self-indulgent -- to take a hint from the title -- but in the sure hands of the director, it pulls us in close to the life, thoughts and feelings of the characters.
The gorgeous piano music composed for the film is a perfect accompaniment. The vocal piece apparently was an instant popular success in China a few years ago.
This is a second in a series of three filmed in the same city along the Yangtze river. The first was called "Curiosity Kills the Cat". The third should be released by 2009.