It’s hard not to view “The Music Box” without a certain amount of melancholy, given that it marks the final outing of acclaimed Chinese director and artist Chen Yi Fei, whose “Evening Liaison” was highly praised at Cannes in 1995. A master painter who studied in New York and whose landscapes regularly fetched high prices at auctions around the world, Chen sadly died in 2005 without finishing the film. Paying tribute to his long time friend, veteran Hong Kong director and producer Ng See Yuen (a former Shaw Brothers executive, who also enjoyed success in the West, working on the Jean-Claude Van Damme hit “No Retreat, No Surrender”) completed the troubled production, which had actually began back in 2002, with the film finally being released in April 2006.

The film begins in Shanghai in the 1930s, following a barber called Lu Ping (”Baober in Love” and “A Westlake Moment” star Chen Kun, who here took over acting duties from original lead Jiang Wen) who flees the city after accidentally killing a Japanese officer, leaving singer Yu Mian (Wang Yajie, recently in “And the Spring Comes”) nursing a broken heart. Hiding out in a small rural town, he falls in love with the feisty Jiayi (Zeng Li), who just happens to be the daughter of his uncle Song (Ren Guangzhi). Unfortunately, she is married off to KMT military commander, Ye Jiangtian (Liu Guanjun). After the Japanese surrender, Lu heads back to Shanghai, where he falls back in with Yu, only for Jiayi to reappear, still with the jealous Ye in tow.

“The Music Box” is somewhat of a mixture in that it is both a typically obtuse piece of art house cinema, and a complex slice of character melodrama. Although the plot may sound reasonably straightforward, Chen adopts a decidedly cavalier approach to storytelling, leaping around between events, treating them as tenuously linked vignettes rather than attempting to weave them together into a conventional narrative. As a result the film has a distinctly dreamlike feel, and at times it does leave the viewer rather disoriented and wondering what they have missed. Thankfully, this is never pushed to the point of incoherence, mainly due to the fact that Chen wisely spends a good amount of time fleshing out and grounding his characters, using them to keep things interesting. Although Lu Ping makes for a passive protagonist, who seems to drift through the film as opposed to actually driving it, he is likeable enough, with Chen Kun turning in a decent performance. The supporting characters who revolve around him and who tend to push him onwards are arguably more appealing, especially the flirtatious Jiayi, whose ambiguous motivations provide actress Zeng Li with a substantial and emotionally complex role.

Given the subject matter and the tumultuous time in which the film is set, a fair amount of social commentary or cinematic metaphor might have been expected. However, this is not the case, with Chen focusing primarily on the look and style of the film, showing a painstaking attention to detail in recreating the period and in bringing it to sumptuous life. Although the film was obviously not as high budget as other historical pieces set in the ever-popular Shanghai of the 1930s and 1940s, it is arguably far more convincing. Unsurprisingly, Chen’s talents as an artist shine through, and the film is an amazingly handsome affair, with nearly every shot brimming with visual sheen and panache. Through this, the viewer is pulled further into the story, or perhaps more accurately into the lives and emotions of the characters, with the film working better as a mood piece than a drama in the traditional sense.

Of course, this does mean that for some “The Music Box” will come across as being somewhat meandering, and indeed it is a film mainly for those willing to put in the effort to bridge its narrative gaps, and those who are likely to enjoy its stylistic excesses. This having been said, Chen does manage to successfully keep one foot in the art house camp and the other in more grounded, commercial cinema, and the film is both entertaining and unconventional. Certainly, it represents the work of a visual master, and though it provides the director with a fitting enough epitaph, it underlines the fact that one of Chinese cinema’s significant voices has sadly been lost.

Yi Fei Chen (director), See-Yuen Ng (uncredited) / Yi Fei Chen (screenplay), Yiping Fan (novel)
CAST: Kun Chen … Lu Ping
Yajie Wang … Yu Mian
Li Zeng … Song Jiayi
Lihong Li, Guanjun Liu, Guobin Peng, Weidong Qin, Guangzhi Ren, Zongwan Wei, Yuanjin Bi