Newsnight Review discussed the remake of a 1948 Chinese classic: Springtime in a Small Town.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK KERMODE:
They have managed to take a basically very straightforward triangular love story, quadrangle in fact, and invest meaning into it which the story doesn't have. A lot of it is to do with the way it's shot and the musical arrangement. It's shot with very slow, sedate tracking shots, so it's always moving before you. It is played against a suspended musical track. It gives you the impression that something is about to happen. The key moment for me was when the lead actress asks how her husband is and is told he doesn't have TB, and she says, "Oh." That could mean several things, but it invested a lot of meaning into a very small amount of action and probably put more meaning than the story itself deserved. It's based originally on a short story. It's a very fine work.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, we talked about the language of sex in Theroux's book, this is as far as you can get from that. The eroticism that's there is in tiny touches and glances. It's a very discreet film. Did you like it?

GERMAINE GREER:
I saw it on video, which is not fair to a film like this. You need to see it in the right colour key. I have no idea if I saw it the right way. But I have really deep reservations about it, I have to say. In the original film, apparently the woman character, there is a female voiceover. Here you have no viewpoint except the camera's viewpoint, which is strangely detached. It's a glass wall. We don't enter into the inscrutable faces of the people. We actually watch them doing things and we choose the things that we watch them doing. But there were really disturbing things about it. Why is the 16-year-old girl behaving like an eight-year-old? What was that about? And why the hell, when they went out on the river or lake or whatever, did they sing the Blue Danube? So much of the music was schlock Western music, and it's a film that seems to endorse the Western way as somehow the aspirational thing and the West always loves them. There are really gutsy films coming out of China.

MARK LAWSON:
Hasn't he got those Western references to make it work in the west?

GERMAINE GREER:
Is it about 1946 or about now? Another thing, I hated that house. I wanted to get the hell out of it. The house was what it was. We kept seeing things through grills. We were supposed to know they were constricted, but Madame Bovary it wasn't.

BILL BUFORD:
It's clearly a very pretty movie, and I started to wonder what the script looked like. I think it could only be about eight pages long. Most of it would be 'Exterior shot -woman on solitary walk. Exterior shot- man goes on solitary walk- Goes inside.' And so on. It was very, very pretty, and very, very slow. After 30 minutes, the big event is a power failure. While it's a nice anecdote to 'Identity' and all the others...

MARK KERMODE:
Cinema is a visual medium. Your criticism is that the medium we see it through is the eye of the camera, that is true of the finest cinema. There is very little dialogue. The scripts will probably give descriptions of the shots. What's wrong with that?

BILL BUFORD:
We got the water colours, the contrast between black and white. I feel I have seen it before.

MARK KERMODE:
I don't think it is pretty. It is very powerful. It has a lot more force than you are giving it credit for. The austere, removed quality that you get, not having it personalised through a woman's voiceover, is important.