An uneven but worthy debut film by Chinese director Sissi Deng. It is actually a Chinese-Malaysian-French coproduction. Young and attractive Brooke travels to a small town Malaysia in the summer, finds herself in three alternative universes, and have
chance encounters with a different set of people. In one she befriends an ethnic Chinese girl living there and they tour museums; in the second she runs into a young-adult set plotting to modernize the town; in the mildly supernatural third she meets a
much older French writer played by Pascal Greggory, and they look for the "Blue Tears." The pace is leisure and the frames of reference for the first and last vignette are clearly Eric Rohmer, in particular _The Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle_
and _The Green Ray_ (also called _Summer_), respectively. (Greggory was in at least one Rohmer film, _Pauline at the Beach_, maybe there were others I forgot!) The three segments represent what might happen with Brooke at three different ages; she has
different backgrounds in the three stories but is essentially the same sensitive person (shades of Kieslowski's _Blind Chance_?). I find the second story a deadly bore but the first and third are utterly charming. I hope the director goes on to have a
long career and makes more offbeat films like this. Chinese cinema should be more than the tiresome, contrived Jia Zhangke provocations and jingoistic propaganda being churned out by Zhang Yimou and other filmmakers much less talented.

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