User Reviews

May Jane, an uneducated but courageous country girl, escapes her destroyed farming village. She tries to lead a large band of orphans through the absurdity and violence of civil war (between Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek's KMT) to a ship that will bring them to safety from China in the 1940's. Extremely sentimental, brilliant, subtly rebellious cinema by the Taiwan/Hong Kong Director, who also wrote the exquisite music and intimately epic plot. Despite a number of terrific performances (including the gorgeous star, made-up to look ordinary) and sophisticated stunning cinematography, the film was unjustly dismissed by Taiwan critics, many of whom apparently harbored old antagonisms toward the director, as well as by both Hollywood-influenced young and patriotic old audiences (ending the composer/director's long successful career). This highly personal, uniquely old-fashioned and visionary film has many long sequences of superb artistry and sustained master filmmaking skill.

Don't understand why it received only 5.5 maybe because audience don't understand Chinese history and culture. Liu Jia Chang is better known as Taiwan's best songs composers with over 2,000 songs mostly composed from the late 60s to the mid-80s. He is also known as a singer and the film director brought Brigitte Lin to stardom with her 2nd movie "Yun Piao Piao" a big hit that broke all previous box office records of love story movies in Taiwan. In the made 70s, he made his most famous movie Mei Hua (Victory) after that most of his movies are acted by his actress wife Zhen Zhen(aka Chen Chen) but they are mostly poorly received by the audience. This 1994 Mei Zhen is his only movie since his last movie in the 80s and turn out to be his best movie ever and also his last. Good direction, acting, song and story. Music is excellent.