Details like this indicate that there is an almost magical feel to the screenplay, which makes the relationship between Zhou Yu and Chen Qing seem both inviolable and somehow fated. And indeed, real life soon begins to intrude in a number of awkward ways. Notable among these are the worldly-wise bar owner Xiu (also played by Gong Li, having fun being the exact opposite of the romantic, dedicated Zhou Yu) and the unreliable veterinarian, Zhang Jiang (played by experienced Chinese TV actor Sun Hong Lei), who meets up with Zhou Yu on the train.

This doubling up of characters is central to Sun Zhou’s theme. “Zhou Yu is more natural and sensitive,” he says, “while Xiu is rather confused. But one is a mirror-image of the other. There is always more than one side to anyone’s character, and it is just a matter of time and chance which one comes to the fore.”

While Xiu has romantic designs on Chen Qing, Zhang Jiang is similarly drawn to Zhou Yu, and begins to sew the seeds of doubt in her mind by proving to her that Xian Hu, the ‘Lake of Fairies’ which features in Chen Qing’s poems, is little more than a half-empty pond.

But it is not so much a matter of destroying romantic illusions as of showing how they can and do coexist with a more clear-eyed view of the world. The gamble that Sun Zhou takes in the film is in finally persuading us that, like Zhou Yu’s love for Chen Qing, Xian Hu is both a half-empty pond and what Chen Qing says it is: the ‘Lake of Fairies’. Thus the magical world of love and the banal, everyday world of crowded trains and imperfect human beings are both as real as each other. That the film has a bittersweet, fatalistic ending does nothing to undermine the romantic power of the story. It is a classic love story with (to western audiences) a very unfamiliar setting.

As with Breaking the Silence, Gong Li was closely involved with developing the story of Zhou Yu’s Train. “I prefer to work with a director who knows very well what he wants to say, but not a director who is so egocentric that you only see the director’s mind in the film and not the actors,” she has said, and now seems determined to steer her career very much into the contemporary arena after almost a decade spent spanning the millennia of Chinese history. Zhou Yu’s Train went into production in the southern province of Yunan in September of last year, with Sony Pictures Classics picking up English-language rights; veteran Hong Kong producer Bill Kong distributing in his home territory; and Good Machine (one of the partners in 2000’s massively successful Chinese movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) handling the rest of the world.

Although requiring no special effects, the film does - as both story and title imply - have a lot of scenes which need to be shot on or around trains, and the production was lucky to get the full support of the Yunan railway authorities, adding hugely to the authenticity of the background detail without which the film’s romantic and/or magical elements could never have functioned so effectively.

As the usually clear-eyed Xiu - Gong Li’s other character - sums it up in the closing scenes of the film, “Love isn’t an easy thing to understand. We search for that elusive something in everyone we meet, finding a fragment here, another piece there. Always hoping.” Which is what Zhou Yu does and what the film is about.