Monk Can Chen has a cloudy past, and withdraws from a temple bearing a sack of money. Innkeeper Wang Haili labours under an uneasy conscience while being haunted by his dead wife, Su Mei. Retiree Fang Yiguo has abandoned his son Shangqin.
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Plausible to contend that the structuration on this film is needlessly convoluted when taking on a seemingly threadbare theme, all but reducible into the dimensions of, say, a Japanese haiku. But in matters of ontology, that is an oversimplification. The permutations of existence can be best described as pleated, curved and folded onto each other despite apparent patterns. There is enough here to hold the jaded eye.