"Lewis Perin" > wrote in message
news
> I saw an excellent Chinese movie last night that, among other virtues,
> uses tea drinking and preparation dramatically to suggest character.
>
> _South of the Clouds_ doesn't seem to have an American distributor,
> and I've no idea where else it can be seen normally in a theater,
> except of course in China. I saw it at a sort of film festival called
> New Directors / New Films at Lincoln Center in New York.
>
> The main character is a 61-year-old recently retired man living in a
> northern city, a widower with three children. It becomes clear that
> he has regrets about the life he's lived there for decades. For
> reasons that aren't understood until later but are clearly important
> to him, he takes a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yunnan, where the second
> half of the film takes place. (The title of the movie is an echo of
> the word "Yunnan".)
>
> The main character is seen in the first part drinking from a drab
> lidded mug, and it accentuates the mild anhedonia of his life in the
> north. In the Yunnan part, where, for reasons I won't explain, he
> becomes mixed up with the law, he meets two tea drinking cops:
>
> - a lazy, crude middle-ranking officer, who drinks a fairly dark tea
> (cooked Puerh, maybe?) from a screw-top glass jar;
>
> - a philosophical police chief, ruefully aware of the bureaucratic
> limits on his ability achieve justice, who makes tea gongfu style
> with a yixing setup.
>
> Does Zhu Wen, this movie's writer/director, think there's a Chinese
> audience these days who are alive enough to tea culture to notice
> these things? Or did he apply these tea touches just for himself?

As a writer myself, I believe it was simply to add another layer of meaning
and depth since everything in a story should reinforce the theme and/or
illustrate the characters and/or advance the plot.

--
~~Bluesea~~
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