China's greatest actor-director Jiang Wen returns with his long-awaited third feature and it's a major cinematic event. This veteran star of Red Sorghum, Keep Cool, and The Emperor's Shadow wrote, directed and stars in this vibrant, operatic, magical-realist tale of love and madness set in China's recent past. This is one-of-a-kind filmmaking, confidently large-scale with overabundant momentum, supercharged with brio, passion, stunning colours and larger-than-life characters.

Jaycee Chan (Jackie's son, and a new young star) is a young commune brigade leader growing up in the outrageously picturesque southwestern countryside of 1970s China. His mother (new actress Zhou Yun) is quite possibly mad: she sings about a lost pair of fish-embroidered sandals and needs to be cajoled down from her favourite perch atop a village tree. Back in the 1950s, at a campus where Liang (Anthony Wong, one of Hong Kong's finest character actors) supervises a dazzling chorus line of woman bakers, he is investigated by the authorities for sexually assaulting the wildly lubricious Dr. Lin (Joan Chen). Returning to the 70s, Liang's buddy Tang (Jiang Wen), is sent down to Chan's idyllic commune for unspecified misdemeanours, but in this pastoral retreat, adultery threatens to end in tragi-comic gunplay. Finally, the stories leap back to the past and the Gobi Desert, where mysterious Russians, a wild nighttime Uyghur bacchanal and a dreamlike flaming magic carpet herald the birth of a mysterious flower-child.

Jiang Wen's storytelling is pitched in all-out epic-comic mode; it's furious energy fairly bursts off the screen. Lyrical and macho, tender and volcanic: this is an unforgettable cinematic vision.

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