'Snow Flower' and the Secret Fan' illustrates ties that bind

 Let's put the footnote at the beginning: Was there ever a more barbaric practice (masking as elegance) than Chinese foot-binding?

Seven-year-old Snow Flower and her friend Lily undergo that torture at the same time, but with very different life results, in a sprawling epic called "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan."

Bound feet are not the least of their bonds in rigid 19th-century China. From cultural crippling and arranged marriages through isolation and revolution, they will be sustained by a deep but problematic loyalty to one another -- matched as laotong (eternal sisters) by a coded contract hidden in the folds of a silk fan.

That's half the story -- the epic, scenic half.

The other interwoven half takes place in contemporary Shanghai, where putative descendants Nina and Sophia have been struggling with their own lifelong friendship, fraying due to divergent careers, social status and love life, not to mention the dizzying distractions of Shanghai itself -- a kind of kaleidoscopic supersized Las Vegas.

Nina (Li Bingbing) has been promoted to open a branch office of her high-powered company in New York. Rebellious Sophia (Gianna Jun), an unpublished and unhappy writer, has a critical bike accident, leaving a cryptic manuscript about Snow Flower and Lily ... .

Tasked with interweaving the two tales is Chinese-American director Wayne Wang, the man who successfully adapted Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" to the screen in 1993. The similarly themed "Snow," based on a book by Lisa See, has the modern women desperately needing to understand their ancestral connections and discovering universal depths of love and feminine friendship in the process.

It also provides a deeper look at that bizarre 10th- to 20th-century foot-binding fashion, which spread from the Song Dynasty's imperial court to the populace at large, becoming a female status symbol and source of power in a world where women had precious few such things. Bound feet were one of the few ways a young lower-class girl might gain upward mobility and a wealthy husband.

But, oy veh, the excruciating process: At around age 4, tiny soft toes and arches were broken, then compressed daily with tight bandages that folded the toes under the sole, squeezing the foot until it eventually achieved the "ideal" 3-inch square shape. Girls were made to walk on their broken feet daily to get used to the pain and the imbalance. Essentially, they were hobbled for life.

Lily's little feet are pronounced to be the most perfect. (On her wedding night, her feet are the erogenous zone of primary interest to her bridegroom.) Hitherto, the bride had made just a single inquiry into sex: "What about the bed business?" she asks. "It can't be as hard as embroidery or cleaning," her friend replies.

Also fascinating is the laotong concept -- that lifetime bond of sisterhood sworn between two friends, intended to survive marriage, childbirth and all other changes in life.  The contract was written in the ancient undercover language of Nushu, which was kept secret from men for 1,000 years.  It remains, to this day, the only known language created by women for women (aside from texting, of course).   

Li Bingbing's Nina/Lily has a stiff fragility that never quite melts, or melts the heart. But South Korean actress Gianna Jun is terrific as Snow Flower/Sophia, the more passionate and high-spirited member of the two pairs.  She has the most adorable little mole on her nose.  You can't take your eyes off it 

 Photographer Richard Wong alternates rich sepia-amber tones, for the past, with washed-out neon colors in the Shanghai present. There are exquisite, heart-wrenching shots of the two women's foreheads touching after a tragedy. And there's the requisite syrupy music by Rachel Portman.

But parallel time-tales as a formal structural device is getting pretty predictable, and perhaps so are the Joy Luck Club mother-daughter-sister generational issues. "Snow Flower" is the Joy Fan Club with sentimental overload, beautiful but dangerously close to being a glorified Chinese chick flick.

At the risk of putting my un-bound foot in my politically incorrect mouth, it made me want to revisit the ever-so-missionary Ingrid Bergman, dutifully making her rounds inspecting little Chinese tootsies in "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness."