Mark Lee Ping-Bing, long-time Hou Hsiao-hsien collaborator (including his most recent film, the stunning The Assassin) and cinematographer of the luminous In the Mood For Love (alongside Christopher Doyle and Pung-Leung Kwan), is back with a new feature this year. Crosscurrent, directed by Yang Chao, picked up the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival, and it’ll get a U.S. release starting this week.
“The core of the film is surreal, almost supernatural—a man and a woman from a different time and space travel against each other, progressively and retrogressively at the same,” says Yang Chao. The U.S. trailer has now arrived, which shows off the ravishing imagery as we journey up the Yangtze. Check it out below, along with the poster.
Mysterious, sublime and elegiac, director Yang Chao’s odyssey blends breathtaking images with fantasy, poetry and history to create a complex magical universe. From the Shanghai metropolis to the snow-capped Tibet mountain, Gao Chun steers his cargo up the Yangtze, a river that has nurtured a centuries-old civilization. He comes across An Lu, a beautiful woman who appears in a different identity at every port recorded by a poetry book. As their intimacy grows, he realizes she gradually turns younger as he journeys upstream. He starts to wonder whether An Lu is supernatural or he is traveling in time. After passing a pagoda that reverberates Buddha’s voice, a flooded town reappeared elsewhere, the grandiose Three Gorges Dam and many other places that have been transformed, he finally arrives at the start of the Yangtze, where he unveils the secret of his past and An Lu.
Crosscurrent opens on October 28 in NYC and expands in the coming weeks.