Spouse's reaction to Rainbow (Gao Xiaosong): "So you've spent all these years working on this stuff, and two hours watching this film on a Saturday night and you still can't tell me what it's about?"
Rainbow looks as if it ought to be interesting and - in parts - it is... but the parts don't really work as a whole, and it is quite hard to feel engaged either by narrative or characters, and to work out what the whole thing is about. Themes suggested in director's blurb (do we fight or accept our destiny? love and arranged marriage) aren't developed in any satisfying way through the film and we have very little sense (I had very little sense, and I was awake and sober) of who the three central characters were beyond their interactions with each other. We saw, for example, Twilight's passivity ('如果。。。' - making decisions large and small on basis of others' actions, as if tossing a coin) without any clue as to how he came to be that way and how he inhabited that passivity; or Twinkle's rather curious combination of helpfulness and acquisitiveness.
And the sound-track and the computer-game quality of the killing scenes? Hmmmm.
But if it's a choice between Rainbow and Life on a String, I'd recommend Rainbow any day (shorter, for starters....) - spouse's reaction to Life probably best not repeated.
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