From "The Golden Cangue" to Tarkovsky

While reading Eileen Chang's "The Golden Cangue", I thought of two different filmmakers. The first was the less obvious one: Tarkovsky. Here's the phrase that brought me from here to there (my English translation from the Italian translation):

"The wind seeps in through the window and agitates the long mirror with the inlaid lacquer frame that hangs on the wall, producing a metallic sound."

That metallic sound. I could hear it because I immediately thought of those scenes in Tarkovsky's films ("Mirror" and "Stalker" and "The Sacrifice" if I recall correctly) where an object moves and produces a sound, a somewhat insistent sound, a sound that portends...

Just look at the rest of this great passage:

"Qiqiao stops it with her hand. The mirror reflects an emerald-green bamboo mat and an ornate landscape roll in green with a golden background, both of them oscillating in the wind; one could get sea-sick looking at them too long. Fixing again her gaze she sees the emerald-green bamboo mat has lost its color, and the landscape in green and gold has been substituted with the funeral portrait of her Husband, and Qiqiao's own face in the mirror is ten years older."

Then later, as opium smoke seemed to fill the pages, I thought of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Flowers of Shanghai", everyone smoking, languid, lying around inside, always inside, almost claustrophobic... And when I go to IMDB, what do I see? The name of Eileen Chang listed under "Writers". If that's not a direct hit, I don't know what is.

[UPDATE: Here are some scenes from Tarkovsky's "Mirror". Listen for the metallic sounds. There's also -- if you can believe it -- a scene of a woman looking in a mirror with her face years older. And here's the opening of "Stalker". That rattling sound will come and go, right up until the very end...]