The tagline of this blog is “I want to Like Movies. Really, I do”. This holds true for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film that I wanted to like, but which would not allow me to do so. For everything I liked about the film, the filmmakers had to bungle up the delivery on those elements. However reluctantly, I had to accept that I hated this movie at every turn.

Snow Flower began as a historical novel which I assume is popular (otherwise, why the film?), but which I suppose the writers had little respect for, as the movie alters the plotline fundamentally. Whereas the novel takes place entirely in 1800s China, chronicling the lifelong friendship of two women, the movie reduces this story to a sideplot and adds an entirely pointless framing story about two women in the present whose lives, a-doi!, parallel the story from the past. This is especially frustrating, as the movie also tells us that the historical plot is merely a book written by one of the present-day women, making the parallels not so much poetic or haunting as they are blunt and obvious. The story was literally written to reflect the lives of these two women, by one of the two women.

About that story. Let’s start with what the movie takes from the book. In 1800’s China, two girls named Snow Flower and Lily were born on the same day, and later even had their feet bound (a particularly gruesome practice in Chinese society) on the same day. Why, they even get visited by the local matchmaker on the same day, which leads not only to their being married off on the same day, but also to their friendship. The matchmaker matches the two girls as laotang, or soul sisters; they will be each others confidantes until the day they die. Snow Flower comes from a rich family, and Lily from a poor one. We should not be surprised that fate switches their lives: Lily marries well and becomes a wealthy aristocrat, while Snow Flower marries poorly and becomes a peasant farmer’s wife, living in a hut. They live in separate towns and are forbidden to speak by Lily’s overbearing and stuck-up mother-in-law, but they communicate secretly by writing messages in the folds of paper fans, which are transported back and forth by servants.

In present day, Nina and Sophia are best friends, raised by a shared foster-mother whom they both despised. So close the two girls were that they signed a laotang contract of their own written, annoyingly cute-enough, on a Faye Wong CD cover. But as they grew older they also grew apart, Nina caught up in a career at a bank and Sophia writing a novel about their faded friendship. On the night that Nina is celebrating her promotion to manager of a new bank branch in America, Sophia attempts to reach her for a goodbye, but is struck by a car on the way and winds up in a coma. Since Sophia has no family, and laotang contracts are apparently the next best thing to power of attorney, Nina is contacted and decides to give up her promotion to stay in China, by Sophia’s bedside.

Oh, that novel Sophia is writing? Nina finds it in her personal belongings, and it’s the story of Snow Flower and Lily.

Now, this all sounds fine for the plot of a whimsical, romantic, chick flick. But my god does the execution ever ruin it. I like the premise of the whole thing, but the actual delivery is atrocious. The film’s attempts at juggling three timelines - Snow Flower and Lily, Nina and Sophia as teens, and Nina and Sophia as adults - are hopelessly flawed. Director Wayne Wang gives the timelines different color schemes so the viewer can tell them apart just by looks alone, but as the movie progresses, the color schemes get confused and suddenly one timeline has another’s colors, and sometimes the colors don’t change at all from one timeline to the next, and since the editing gives no definitive breaks from one story to the next, you may as well give up all hope of telling the stories apart. They all just bleed together after a while.

You know what else really bothers me? How little of Snow Flower’s life we really see. She’s in the title of the movie, and she’s secondary even in her own timeline. This movie should have been called “Lily and the Half-Hearted Attempts at Communication”. Lily is always at the front, and she really doesn’t try very hard to keep up with her supposed soul-sister. The Lily/Snow Flower time line is constantly jumping ahead in time (really, you’ve never seen “One Year Later” used so often as it is in this film) and we are left to assume that Lily checks in on Snow Flower once a year. Maybe. Later on, when they are older, Lily visits Snow Flower and is stunned to see her friend living as a peasant. She’s been a peasant since she got married at the age of 10, but thirty years later, Lily can’t believe it. Way to pay attention. I mean, really, am I supposed to care? These people never communicate and I’m supposed to be invested in their “timeless friendship”?

It’s not as bad as Nina and Sophia, though. I sat through this whole movie and I have no idea why they’re even friends. They grew up together, sure, but so what? They have seemingly nothing in common, and their adult lives are reduced to a handful of scenes where they talk about their childhood, and then have a fight and stop being friends. I have no idea why Nina would so quickly dump her lucrative new job to stay in China and and hang around Sophia’s bedside reading her awful manuscript for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, as if it’s some kind of atonement for letting their friendship die. Because they both liked Faye Wong when they were kids? Because they both hated their foster mom? Woo-hoo, movie.

There’s an old rule in screenwriting 101: show, don’t tell. If you want to invest the audience in your story, you need to show them the events that make an impact of the character’s lives. But Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is all tell. Most of the major events are simply narrated. Typhoid fever kills Lily’s family. We only hear about it. Taipei rebels destroy Snow Flower’s village. We only hear about it. Sophia has an affair with a man Nina doesn’t trust. We only hear about it. On and on. What we do see is basically the time in-between the interesting parts. In other words, the boring stuff.

The actors all range from bland to flesh-searingly awful, and the dialogue they have is no better. A particularly egregious example is the scene where Sophia tells Nina about her plans to write a book. This happens late in the film, and the writers felt it necessary to have Sophia (woodenly) say “it’s about two people a long time ago, but I think it’s also about us”. You THINK so? Really? Never would have guessed. It’s not like the characters in both stories are played by the same women - oh wait they are. Fuck you, movie. I haven’t heard exposition that clumsy in years.

I forgot to mention that Sophia’s boyfriend is played by Hugh Jackman. The movie glosses over all the good stuff, so I guess I can get away with glossing over the one good actor.