Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie Review

A joyless, luckless two-fold tale of female friendship.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 22, 2011

Director Wayne Wang may have advanced East-meets-West cinema in 1993 with his sublime film version of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, but his latest attempt at a literary adaptation about Asian female-bonding—the soppy Snow Flower and the Secret Fan—is an enormous step backwards. This isn’t exactly surprising if you look at Wang’s more recent output, which includes lightweight studio-commissioned fluff like Maid in Manhattan and Because of Winn-Dixie. His movies have gotten progressively more sentimental and Hollywood-ish over the years, and Snow Flower—a bastardization of the 2005 novel by Lisa See—feels like some hypothetical Wong Kar-Wai film ham-handedly remade in the U.S. for hanky-carrying, nose-blowing, eye-drying audiences. At the same time, while it clearly aims to get the waterworks flowing, it never really succeeds. Wang has added a parallel contemporary storyline to See’s original 19th century narrative, in the process making the film too diffuse to connect emotionally. A lot happens—pestilence and rebellion, friendship fall-out and a coma-inducing bicycle accident—but not much of it makes any impact despite the soaring Chinese violin score.

Snow Flower and Lily...

The premise of the novel—and the film—is the old Chinese tradition of laotong, a marriage-like legal contract which bonded two unrelated young girls in eternal friendship and sisterhood. The purpose of this arrangement was to give both girls someone to rely on throughout their lives, and this was especially important since, historically, women in China were forced into arranged marriages and treated like little more than foot- bound, house-tending baby-makers, expected to produce sons and slave away for their mother-in-laws. A laotong pair would usually correspond using the secret, women-only written language of nu-shu—a syllabic system completely different from normal, pictorial Chinese characters—and they would sometimes scrawl their letters to one another on the inner folds of paper fans. Hence, the film’s title.

The split-narrative of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan follows—and jumps chronologically between—two laotong pairings, one in the rural Hunan province during the mid-19th century, and the other in contemporary Shanghai. In the former, Snow Flower (Gianna Jun) and Lily (Li Bingbing) come from different social classes but are bound together by a laotong match-maker who decides that their astrological birth signs make them a compatible duo. Their lives diverge quite drastically. Although Snow Flower was born of higher rank, she marries a comparatively poor, physically abusive butcher and suffers all kinds of tragedies and horrors, from displacement because of the Taiping Revolution to the death of her children. Meanwhile, because of her perfectly bound feet, the lower-class Lily is married off to a respectable merchant and eventually rises to a position of matriarchal power as Lady Lu. The lifelong relationship between the two women has its expected ups and downs, the downs marked by jealously and suspected betrayal.

The drama between Lily and Snow Flower provided more than enough story for the novel, but for some reason—presumably to attract a wider Western audience—it was decided that a second, more modern plot needed to be added for the film version, with the actresses doubling up on roles. In this thread, Li Bingbing plays Nina, a high-powered executive who’s about to be sent to New York by her company to open a new branch. On the night of her going-away party, she learns that her adopted Korean sister and former best friend, Sophia (Gianna Jun, again)—whom she hasn’t seen in months—is in a coma after being hit by a car. They’ve had a falling out for reasons initially unexplained, and as Nina begins to investigate the blacked-out, out-of-contact gap in their friendship, she discovers a manuscript that Sophia has written: the story of Snow Flower and Lily, a thinly disguised retelling of their own laotong relationship.

This isn’t nearly as clever as the film seems to think it is, and rather than adding anything to the scope of the novel, it really only detracts. We flit around time-wise between the girls’ high school days as BFFs and their diverging adult lives—Sophia falls for Hugh Jackman as an Australian lounge crooner who sings, no kidding, in Mandarin—and there’s simply not much dramatic or emotional urgency in these present-day scenes. At several junctures the film feels like it could feasibly become a lesbian love story, only to stop teasingly short. While Li Bingbing and Gianna Jun are generally wonderful in the original timeline, the modern story requires them to act several scenes in English, with which neither actress seems particularly comfortable.

Besides loosely stating that friendship between women hasn’t really changed much over the centuries, Snow Flower doesn’t draw enough of a connection between the distinct timelines, so we’re left feeling like we’ve just watched half of two separate films. Had the three writers of the screenplay been content to adapt the novel as-is, we might have been given a moving period drama with a fleshed out world. Instead, the film’s short 104 minutes struggle to convey the necessary depth of the original story, while revealing the essential shallowness of the new narrative.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The one thing Snow Flower and the Secret Fan has going for it is that it's beautifully shot, and the lush cinematography is well represented in the Blu-ray's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. Shot on 35mm, the movie retains all of its natural filmic texture and appearance here, with no grain-erasing DNR or halo-inducing edge enhancement. Neither are there any specks, scratches, or debris—the print, as you'd hope for a contemporary release, is in perfect condition. That's not to say the transfer is perfect, although it does showcase the film nicely. Black levels can be a bit too crushed during darker interior scenes—this is partially intentional, I'm sure, but it can get somewhat heavy handed—and certain scenes have a slightly soft quality. Still, these are trivial issues and far from distracting. Clarity is generally strong, with fine high definition detail visible in the actors' faces and clothing. Color reproduction is excellent too, with vibrant reds and golds and warm but never oversaturated skin tones. You may spot patches of noise in certain scenes, but there are no major compression issues—banding, macroblocking, etc. Snow Flower looks lovely.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround that—if I had to break it down—is probably about 70% in Mandarin and 30% in English. This isn't an especially active or effects-heavy mix, but it is rich and dynamic, especially when it comes to the film's score, a sweeping Chinese violin soundtrack that tries doggedly to play the heartstrings, oversupplying emotion where the story itself lacks it. The music is spread throughout all 5.1 channels, and the timbre of the violin is wonderfully crisp and detailed. It sounds great when you turn the volume up. Hugh Jackman's big band number also has plenty of sonic swing. The rest of the track is largely front-heavy and anchored with dialogue, but the rear speakers do pipe up occasionally to broadcast quiet ambience—Shanghai traffic noise, drizzling rain, wind blowing between channels—and a handful of panned effects. Most importantly, conversation is always clean and balanced, with no muffling or lowness. English subtitles automatically appear for dialogue spoken in Mandarin, but you can also select full-time English SDH, French, or Spanish subtitles.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Sworn Sisterhood of the Secret Fan (1080p, 29:02): The lone feature of substance on the disc is this half-hour making-of documentary, which provides the usual assortment of behind-the-scenes footage and talking head interviews.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:01)

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans of The Joy Luck Club will be disappointed by director Wayne Wang's return to the East-meets-West girl talk genre, as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a trite adaptation that unwisely diverges from its source material. (I can imagine the novel's admirers will be much pleased either.) Although it's beautiful in short stretches, the film feels emotionally empty and fails to connect. If you're still curious, the Blu-ray release is strong—with great picture quality and sound—but this disc probably isn't worth a purchase. I'd suggest a rental.