Chang hen ge

Just saw the movie at the Venice Film Festival and it was mediocre. My review is somewhat biased because the movie is most likely geared towards the Chinese market and my cultural knowledge of China is very limited hence I may have failed to culturally relate to the film. However, the film felt episodic, in a bad sense, and, probably for budgetary reasons, the action was as if in a vacuum in the sense that the characters were certainly impacted by the events surrounding them, the rise of communism and détente, or whatever you may call it. But, we never experience, either through documentary footage or through outside shots, what China was going through at the time. Thus, it's hard to place the characters in the history that surrounds them. In this sense, the movie felt like a play. The acting was decent, nevertheless the lead actress was only passable. After being saturated by the main characters, I felt almost coerced into feeling invested in their lives and thus was curious to see the ending. However, the ending failed to make for the remainder of the film.