Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: Critic Reviews

Sadly, rather than melding the best of two worlds, the film only takes the worst of their soap operas.

For those who may have wondered if foot binding, wife beating and a crooning Hugh Jackman could fit into one movie, here's the short answer: no.

Here is a very self-conscious attempt to bridge the US-China divide through the medium of glossy, handsomely mounted cinema.

Perhaps this was intended to draw the largely female crossover audience that went to Joy Luck Club. But the dual stories don't mesh well.

Emphasizes melodrama over character development, until the proceedings feel like a rabbit hole of misfortune.

All the two actresses do is gaze out of apartment and carriage windows, through floorboards, into each other's eyes, and, once, while wishfully wearing a man's suit.

As the parallel friendships evolve over time, both push and pull between platonic and erotic; it's to the film's credit that it never definitively suggests that love can only be one or the other.

Its story-within-a-story - a tale of two laotong, or soul sisters, in oppressive mid-1800s China - is gorgeous but simplistic.

While the action flashes back and forth in increments of centuries, years or months, we're adrift in the here and now, trying to get a grip on the characters and their relationships, yet finding it loosened with every new dislocation.

I briefly felt bad when the film, in its first five minutes, knocked Sophie into a coma. But I felt even worse 10 minutes later: Dear reader, I envied her.

As movies about female bonding go, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" is thin tea.

The film version of "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" proceeds as if willed into being by a particularly misguided "question for discussion," the kind you'd find at the tail end of a bestseller's paperback edition.

Wang ... needlessly pads the movie with heart-tugging gimmicks and canned melodrama that undercuts its raw impact.

In this lavish adaptation of Lisa See's novel, the complex chronologies of the parallel narratives are skillfully handled by director Wayne Wang, which makes his reliance on unbridled sentimentality all the more irritating.

A story of much visual grace and, sadly, considerable narrative awkwardness.

It's the No-Joy, Bad-Luck Club.

It's a coordinated, stylish dance, but the steps are awfully familiar.

The film is visually sumptuous but emotionally inert. It never draws in the viewer.

What should be a moving testament to the enduring friendship between two Chinese women instead plays like a bewildering apologia for co-dependency issues.

You're advised to bring a hankie or two should you venture forth to see the tearjerker "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan."

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" aims for the heartstrings and only strikes a few notes.

[A] confusing time-travelling tale that uses Lisa See's 2005 bestseller of the same name to fuel cheap sentiment and a jumbled story.

The juxtaposition of stories about women in old and new China may have been intended to widen the audience for Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but all it does is lose the heart and pathos of See's novel in a jumbled mess.

An emotionally powerful tale of two sets of Chinese women in two different centuries.

The trouble is that the modern story whipped up for "Snow Flower" isn't very compelling. Yet it dominates the movie, continually oozing back in just as the period drama is getting interesting.