What a ride! Multiple betrayals. Chases on horseback. Scenes out of Schiller. Bad guys identified with mustaches. Good guys with beards or clean shaven. Heroic women. Dastardly villains. Silly villains. Even a disgruntled sidekick for comic effect. A rare chance to see Ruan Ling-yu, whose short life and cruel death gave Stanley Kwan his film, Center Stage.
We see lovers and friends betraying and betrayed, a society whose corruption has a Felix-The-Cat simplicity, a bureaucracy flawed by nepotism and cruel whim. It is China in 1931 as interpreted by a Hollywood-influenced Chinese film industry. If we look between the frames we can see a piece of the future as one would wish it to be, with goodness sleeping somewhere in every human heart.
But we cannot help but know better. It is before Manchukuo, before the civil war, before Nanking, before the Great Leap Forward, before The Cultural Revolution.
The film is mostly just escapist fun, but the context, and we can sense the context, and the future, from Ruan Ling-yu's suicide to China's half-century of unimaginable suffering, make this moment of fun worthy of reverence.
We see lovers and friends betraying and betrayed, a society whose corruption has a Felix-The-Cat simplicity, a bureaucracy flawed by nepotism and cruel whim. It is China in 1931 as interpreted by a Hollywood-influenced Chinese film industry. If we look between the frames we can see a piece of the future as one would wish it to be, with goodness sleeping somewhere in every human heart.
But we cannot help but know better. It is before Manchukuo, before the civil war, before Nanking, before the Great Leap Forward, before The Cultural Revolution.
The film is mostly just escapist fun, but the context, and we can sense the context, and the future, from Ruan Ling-yu's suicide to China's half-century of unimaginable suffering, make this moment of fun worthy of reverence.