Tourists flock to this quaint town to see the famous terraces and to gawk at the local minority people, the Hani. As Ruo Ma sells her corn in the town, tourists notice her exotic beauty and pose with her for photos. At first she is embarrassed. But when a young photographer who is living in the town gets her to smile for them, young Ruo Ma gets her first crush. The photographer has come to the town to work on his own budding career. Early on we see he is not doing so well; the landlord is hounding him to pay the rent and all he can say is, my girlfriend will pay when she gets here. In the meantime, he talks Ruo Ma into posing for tourists for money with him getting a cut. Ruo Ma is enchanted by this big-city stranger and fascinated by the idea of getting to go to the city and ride on an elevator. But the girlfriend does show up and briefly gets in the way of Ruo Ma’s friendship trying to talk the photographer into coming back to the city with her. Eventually, she leaves and Ruo Ma’s flirtation builds.

There is a sweet scene where the photographer comes to her house out in the country and the two of them run along the tops of the terraces until he falls into the water and they have a water fight. When the landlord finally lays down the law and the photographer decides to throw in the towel and return to the city, Ruo Ma makes plans to go with him.

Li Min as Ruo Ma is just lovely. She is not classically beautiful, but her smile lights up the screen and her reactions to the world are so true. When the photographer gives her a Walkman to listen to music, you would think she’d gone to heaven. This is a sweet story beautifully filmed. Grill some corn and rent it. Released in 2002.

The musical within the film reminded me of “Moulin Rouge” and the music though less prominent was totally up to that level. (“Perhaps Love” was made four years after “Moulin Rouge”, so I would not be surprised if the director was heavily influenced by it.) Jacky Cheung is wonderful as the director/circus owner singing many of the best songs in the movie. And Takeshi Kaneshiro is very easy on the eyes, so watching him as the heart sick lover is not a bad way to pass some time. A friend in China highly recommended this to me and I can see why. I am sure that if I spoke the language better, I would get it on another level, but even with the subtitles, I was entirely entertained. (Film release date: 2005)

This is not a movie for people looking for kung fu action or snappy dialogue. But if you are looking for a really good love story, this is it. The film opens with the grown son coming home to the village because his father, the school teacher, has died.  His  father’s and mother’s love story is told in flashback and is as simple as can be — yet it is painfully sweet and if you can watch it without crying, you have no heart. The present day story of the son with his grieving mother bookends the central love story, but is itself equally poignant.

Zhang Ziyi has loads of camera time where her face tells the story and she is brilliant.  Grab some Chinese food, dumplings are appropriate for this one, and a box of tissues and rent it now.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is beautifully shot in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan with the otherworldly landscape heightening the strange displacement of the father in a country where he cannot communicate without a translator. In one scene, he is lost in what looks like a Chinese Grand Canyon, chasing after the young son of the opera singer he needs to film for his dying son. The opera singer just happens to be stuck in jail and is desperate to meet his son. The boy has never met his real father and is being forced to go meet him as a prerequisite to the Japanese father shooting the opera for his son. The Japanese father’s difficult interactions with the child remind him of his own strained relationship with his dying son. Since he can’t communicate with the little boy in his own language (the boy is Chinese and he is Japanese) he is forced to be loving and kind. It is sweet and funny and, yes, I did get weepy.

Ikiru is more about the father than the son who is so disinterested that he doesn’t even want to hear it when his father tries to tell him he is dying. The father has been a bureaucrat his whole adult life and is so unconnected to the world that his office mates have nicknamed him “The Mummy.” After getting his death sentence from the doctor, he wakes up to the waste of his life and decides to do one meaningful thing before he dies; he forces the powers-that-be to build a park for some desperately poor families who have been stuck in his bureaucratic hell. But before he gets this epiphany, in a Felliniesque sequence, he descends into underworld Tokyo with a writer he meets in a restaurant, drinking and dancing and hanging out with the dregs of society. Not finding meaning there, he runs into a young woman, a former coworker, by chance and is so taken with her joy in life that he decides to find his own bliss before he dies. Returning to work, he finds the request from a group of mothers for a playground for their children and making it happen becomes his final act. I guess most of what I know of Kurosawa is from his samurai movies, but this one has such quiet dignity, I was blown away. Kurosawa based Ikiru on Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Time to head to the library.

I’d recommend both of these films to people who want to see well shot, well acted, well written, quiet, strong films. Of course, you have to be up for subtitles and in the case of Ikiru, black and white.