"Alongside The Black Cannon Incident (see January 31), this was the best first feature made in China last year. It chronicles the defeats and betrayals suffered by an old musician in Guangzhou (Canton) in the last years of his life-years which have seen startling changes in China's social fabric. He entered 'New China' in 1949 with an opium habit, a black mark that ended his marriage and cost him his job. Now he struggles along coaching an amateur orchestra, but is heart-broken when his son (a Red Guard turned dissident) rejects him and tries to buy an illegal passage to Hong Kong. And the old man's posthumous fate is to have his music travestied by his daughter, who turns it into a hideous piano concerto. Implicitly a state-of-the-nation report, Zhang's film is deeply pessimistic. But it's an angry and engaged pessimism; the surgeon's knife cuts deep to cure." -Tony Rayns, San Francisco International Film Festival '87