Review of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2011) by Kara I — 08 Aug 2011

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is one of the WORST film adaptations I've ever seen.

The book explores the culture of 19th century China through a woman's eyes; in the book you see real relationships and heartbreak. The movie squanders all of that in favor of appearing "artistic" or "deep"; something it does not pull off at all.

They unnecessarily add some modern characters to "parallel" the girls from the book. Said modern characters randomly switch between speaking Chinese and English, adding to the overall confusion and mess of the movie. The movie constantly switches back and forth from the modern to the actual book story line, making it extremely hard to follow, even for someone who has read the book. This also means that you make no real attachment to any of the characters. They change lines around and only include scenes of "significance" from the book- making it all completely insignificant. You get no sense of the deep-heart love they speak of. You barely see the characters at all.

Overall, it is essentially two hours of thinking, "Is the movie going to start yet?".

A real waste of an amazing book.