You can bet Wayne Wang won’t be premiering this one on Youtube. Unlike the fate of his last two films (The Princess of Nebraska and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers), if Wang does follow threw with this project, you can pretty much beat it’ll come with the same buzz that was wrapped around Memoirs of a Geisha for the better part of two decades.
Production Weekly’s twitterfeed announced that Ziyi Zhang will be one of the lead actresses in the pair that are featured in Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower And The Secret Fan – judging from the book’s description could potentially be a visual feast on themes of longing and solitude.
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
