When her last collaboration with director Sun Zhou - the social drama Breaking the Silence - got a special screening at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2000, Gong Li was in the most honoured position of all: she was president of the Festival Jury. But she was disarmingly modest about her new film, which gave her one of her rare contemporary roles. “I’m just an actress,” she said at the time. “It is the director who chooses how the film will go.”
‘Just an actress’ is not a phrase one would readily apply to Gong Li, the first superstar to emerge from Chinese cinema. A winner of the Best Actress Award for her role in The Story of Qiu Ju at the Venice Film Festival in 1992 and a veteran of 21 films, Gong Li is probably the most widely recognised Chinese actress in the world, thanks to her role as one of the faces of L’Oréal. Of late, too, the actress has become more and more active in the shaping of her career, whose other festival highlights include top prize at both the other two main film festivals: a Golden Bear for Red Sorghum in Berlin in 1988 and a Palme d’Or for Farewell, My Concubine at Cannes in 1993.
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Chinese star Gong Li plays two very different roles in Zhou Yu’s Train. But, director Sun Zhou tells Sam Connolly, they are really two different sides of the same personality.
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Gong Li had, in fact, been instrumental in getting Breaking the Silence - the story of a single mother struggling to get an education for her deaf child - made. She had met its writer/director on the set of Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin, in which they both had starring roles. And the collaboration proved so successful that they have teamed again on Zhou Yu’s Train, which stars the actress in what the producer has called “possibly the most complete feminine character in contemporary Chinese cinema”.
The film is very different from the Chinese movies which have found their way into the western mainstream over the past few years. It is a story set in modern China and it focuses on just four main characters, two of them played by Gong Li. Its setting is very specific: the small northern town of Sanming and the nearby city of Zhongyang. But, says director Sun Zhou, who co-wrote the screenplay for Zhou Yu’s Train, “love and romance are a universal theme. We may all have grown up in different cultures, but love is the same everywhere. It is a theme that will be appreciated worldwide.”
The story of a woman’s determined but ultimately fated search for ideal love, Zhou Yu’s Train has an added interest for international audiences: it is set very much against the backdrop of ordinary, everyday life in the north of China. Gong Li plays the title character, a skilled decorator who works in the Sanming ceramics factory and who appears to find her ideal soul-mate in librarian Chen Qing (played by Hong Kong star Tony Leung Ka Fai, first seen by western audiences in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover). Chen Qing is a poet, and Zhou Yu is seduced more by his poems than by the man himself. Indeed, part of her obsession is to get his poetry published, even if she has to pay the printing costs herself.
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The only problem with this perfect love affair is that Zhou Yu lives in Sanming, while Chen Qing lives a day’s journey away in Zhongyang. So, every weekend, Zhou Yu takes the train to Zhongyang, sitting quietly by the window. Once in Chen Qing’s tiny apartment, however, all the shyness disappears and the couple make passionate love, followed by sharing a bowl of sweet tofu soup delivered by a street peddler.
