Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

It's clear that the people who made the big-screen version of SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN encountered many challenges. It's often difficult adapting a novel, especially a literary one like Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, into a movie. The pitfalls are great: How to condense so much action into a seamless whole? How to translate the lyricism of words into images? What we get here is a hodge-podge of sometimes-stunning visual poetry, lethargic pacing, unevenly developed characters, unexplained motivations, and two story lines, one of which is far more compelling than the other.

Glimpses of the painful process of foot-binding and the repression of women in China's past are truncated, leaving us wanting more. Splintering the storytelling between 19th-century China and modern-day Shanghai renders the present irrelevant and, frankly, uninteresting. For all the glitter and glamour of cosmopolitan Shanghai, what's more intriguing is the history and friendships from the past. How did women cope? Why didn't the nu shu language survive? Did every woman have a laotong? So many questions, so few answers, so little satisfaction. But, hey, Hugh Jackman makes an appearance ... leaving us more perplexed than ever.