General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

And the Spring Comes

And the Spring Comes (立春, Li Chun) is a 2007 Chinese drama film directed by Gu Changwei, his second feature after Peacock (2005). It follows Wang Cailing, an unattractive middle-aged music teacher in a small northern Chinese city who dreams of an operatic career, and it premiered on October 23, 2007 at the Rome Film Festival before its Chinese theatrical release on April 10, 2008.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Chinese title	立春 (Li Chun), also the name of the "Spring Comes" solar term in the Chinese lunar calendar³
Director / writer	Gu Changwei (his second feature); screenplay by Li Qiang, who also wrote Peacock²^•⁴
Premiere / release	October 23, 2007 (Rome Film Festival); April 10, 2008 in Chinese theaters¹
Lead performance	Jiang Wenli as Wang Cailing; she gained about 15 kg and wore prosthetic teeth and skin blemishes for the role⁵
Setting	A provincial city in northern China in the late 1980s and 1990s, during the transition from planned to market economy⁶
Major awards	Best Actress, 2nd Rome Film Festival (2007); Best Actress, 27th Golden Rooster Awards (2009); Asian Film Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Screenwriter (2009)⁷^•⁸^•⁹
Reported budget and box office	20 million yuan investment; 2.667 million yuan box office¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

Wang Cailing (Jiang Wenli) teaches music at a school in a small county town in northern China. Plain in appearance but gifted with an operatic voice, she is obsessed with opera and determined to leave for Beijing, where she hopes to sing, though the townspeople have little interest in opera.¹⁰ The steel worker Zhou Yu (Wu Guohua) hears her singing a Verdi aria over the factory public-address system and asks her to coach him, but he is more interested in Wang herself; Wang, in turn, falls for his friend Huang Sibao (Li Guangjie), a would-be painter who wants to study in Beijing, and is humiliated and abandoned by him.⁴

In Beijing, a fixer demands money for the residence permit she desperately wants, and she is again refused an audition at the Beijing Opera.⁴ Devastated, she jumps from a building and survives with a broken arm.¹ She then befriends Hu Jinquan (Jiao Gang), a ballet teacher ostracized by the town for his profession and his homosexuality, who proposes a marriage of convenience; when she refuses, he takes drastic action that gets him taken away by the authorities.¹^•⁴ The young singer Gao Beibei (Zhang Yao) later persuades Wang, by claiming to be terminally ill, to spend her savings helping her enter a national singing competition, a story that turns out to be fabricated.¹⁰ At the end of the film Wang adopts a daughter, Xiao Fan, from an orphanage and finds a new footing in ordinary life.¹⁰

Production background

Gu Changwei, born in 1957 in Xi'an, studied at the Beijing Film Academy alongside Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang as part of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, and built a career as a cinematographer on films including Red Sorghum, King of the Children, Farewell My Concubine, and In the Heat of the Sun, as well as Hollywood projects such as Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man.² His directing debut Peacock won the Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, and And the Spring Comes was his second feature.²^•¹¹

The film was scripted by Li Qiang, who had also written Peacock, with a reported investment of 20 million yuan.⁴^•⁶ Gu said the story is set from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, a period of rapid development of the commodity economy, in contrast to Peacock's 1970s planned-economy setting; he described the film as a story of ordinary people's lives, emotions, and fates.¹² The title refers to the "Spring Comes" (立春) solar term, and Gu explained it as marking the moment when the calendar says spring has arrived although the weather is still winter, matching the film's setting at the beginning of the reform era.¹³

Filming took about three months, with a long post-production period; a technical problem caused the film to miss that year's Venice Film Festival, and it instead entered the competition of the new Rome Film Festival as the only Chinese-language film in contention.¹⁴

Music

Western classical music is central to the film. The soundtrack uses two art songs, Schubert's "Frühlingsglaube" (慕春, also translated as "Faith in Spring") and Mendelssohn's "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" (乘着歌声的翅膀), and two opera arias, Puccini's "Vissi d'arte" (为艺术，为爱情, from Tosca) and the "Song to the Moon" (月亮颂) from Dvořák's Rusalka; a scholarly analysis credits these pieces with advancing the plot and shaping Wang's character.¹⁵ The aria "Vissi d'arte" recurs as the expression of Wang's dream, and the film also mixes in period Chinese pop songs, including Mandarin and Cantonese hits of the era.¹⁴^•¹⁶ The score is credited to Dou Peng, with cinematography by Wang Lei.⁴

Reception and awards

At the 2nd Rome Film Festival, Jiang Wenli won Best Actress; the jury praised a performance in which she was, in its words, fully immersed in the role of a woman living in closed, oppressive circumstances who refuses to compromise.⁷ She went on to win Best Actress at the 27th Golden Rooster Awards in 2009 and at the 5th Chinese American Film Festival, and the film received 2009 Asian Film Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Screenwriter.⁸^•⁹

Critical response was divided on the film's structure rather than its craft. Screen's review called it a funny-sad character study, ravishingly shot, whose loose, episodic structure delivers less poetic payoff than Peacock, while praising Jiang's compelling performance.⁴ Time Out described it as a beautifully paced examination of loneliness that hits a few hollow notes.¹⁷ In China, the film drew commentary on its bleakness; one widely quoted review titled it "the insulted and the injured" and argued that the film belongs to Jiang Wenli's performance above all.¹⁸ Reported box office was 2.667 million yuan against a 20 million yuan investment.¹⁰

Reported running times differ among databases: 94 minutes (AsianWiki, Time Out, Rotten Tomatoes), 101 minutes (Chinese sources), and 105 minutes (Screen).¹^•¹⁰^•⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Sports and music drama films 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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