Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – review

Defending her husband Rupert from an assailant at the Commons select committee meeting last July, Wendi Murdoch seemed to be auditioning for a martial arts movie. "Crouching Tycoon, Hacking Dragon" perhaps. The film she's actually produced is a version of Lisa See's bestselling novel that tells the parallel stories of two women from revolution-torn 19th-century China and two women from booming 21st-century Shanghai, each pair united by the ancient practice of "laotong", which binds them together as eternal sisters, or as the online acronyms have it, FFL and BFF. The film's Australian connection is an appearance by Hugh Jackman serenading one of the modern girls in a Shanghai nightclub and impregnating her. It's a three-handkerchief weepie untainted by ugly politics.