"In China," a prologue states, "the most respectable people are women, yet they are also the most miserable people. This is the theme of the film." End of polemic: what follows is a poetic, almost mystical evocation of "women's place" on the eve of the revolution, set in the mountainous region of Ouizhou Province and mirrored by its wild landscapes. Xingxian is an 18-year-old woman who marries, according to custom, a "younger man"-that is, a six-year-old child-and moves in with her mother-in-law for the duration of her husband's childhood. Things are more or less harmonious, the boy regarding his wife as an older sister, until the arrival of a young man to the village precipitates the inevitable conflict between love and marriage. Caught between her own desires and the demands of tradition-upheld by village gossips for whom she will always be an outsider-Xingxian has only her mother-in-law to turn to for dubious comfort. An astonishingly frank and powerful film, A Good Woman is, as critic Derek Elley writes for the London Film Festival, "all the more powerful for its use of symbolic rather than explicit images.... Stunningly shot in images of graceful, flowing beauty, this is balladic cinema of the highest order."