Comrades, Almost a Love Story (Tian mi mi)

 

Director Peter Chan Ho-Sun

COMRADES, ALMOST A LOVE STORY (Tian mi mi)                A                                      Hong Kong  (118 mi)  1997  d: Peter Chan Ho-Sun

Sweetly, you smile sweetly.
It looks like flowers blossoming in the spring wind,
Blossoming in the spring wind.
Where, where have I seen you before?
Your smile is so familiar,
But I can’t recall at this moment.
Ah! In my dreams...
In my dreams, in my dreams I’ve seen you before.
Sweetly, you smile so sweetly.
It’s you!  It’s you!  The one in my dreams is you!

—Tian mi mi (Sweet Honey), theme song sung by Teresa Teng, Tian Mi Mi – Teresa Teng Lyrics [CHINESE MANDARIN | PINYIN YouTube (3:25)

A nuanced, richly detailed love story that spans ten years and follows the aspirations of two star-crossed Chinese mainlanders who simultaneously come to Hong Kong in 1986 with a dream of assimilation in search of upward economic mobility, a journey finally taking them to New York, where they blend into the Chinese melting pot of America.  The film stars Maggie Cheung as Li Qiao, ambitious, shrewd, and hard-working, an opportunistic entrepreneur from Guangzhou who takes a backward newcomer, Leon Lai, playing naïve northerner Li Xiao-jun under her wings, where the mutual experience of physical dislocation and urban isolation quickly escalates into a heated love affair until a stock market crash signals the end, “You’re not what brought me to Hong Kong, and I’m not what brought you,” only to meet again three years later after he marries his childhood sweetheart, Fang Xiao-ting, played by newcomer Kristy Yang, where a stream of narrated letters written to her poetically underscores the cultural differences.  Their passion rekindles, but she becomes a girlfriend to Hong Kong triad mob boss Pao (Eric Tsang) for security and safety, and is forced to depart for New York, where they cross paths once again in a glorious moment that reflects a genuine love that fills the screen. Unapologetically romantic and genuinely moving, Chan is able to navigate us through a labyrinth of detours and pitfalls for the featured lovers without cloying sentimentality.  Foregoing part of his salary in order to guarantee the signing of Cheung, the film reflects on the experiences of youth, displacement, Chinese diaspora and cultural identity, and trying to find a place in a vibrant Hong Kong, which has long been a gateway for Chinese migrants who follow a dream.  With opportunities for the accumulation of wealth and social mobility limited in 1980’s China, the prospects of achieving middle-class status is achievable only in the freedom of Hong Kong, a land of opportunities for migrants who want a better life, just like the American Dream.  Issues of identity plague the territory and take on an elevated significance since the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration announcing the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, where this film serves as an allegory for that tenuous relationship.  Hong Kong is a dream for mainlanders, but for most in Hong Kong, with the handover looming, many are looking to leave for the West.  While there was initially a rush of anticipation about a hopeful transnational reunification, that reality has been a crushing disappointment, as all dreams have been dashed by a repressive push to abolish all democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, including freedom of the press, while also wiping out what was a world renowned film industry.  Drenched in romanticism, filled with a yearning for a better life, this becomes a eulogy and nostalgic love letter to a Hong Kong that no longer exists, where its historical destination as a transit stop for those seeking economic prosperity came to an abrupt end, becoming a bittersweet goodbye to the dreams of youth, having been suffocated out of existence by the repressive authoritarian rule of Communist China, now just a lingering memory, where this represents the best the Hong Kong film industry had to offer, resulting in one of the standout films from the Handover period, listed at #12 in a list of The 100 best Hong Kong movies - Time Out.  An important differentiation with Hollywood is that most Hong Kong films didn’t have readings, or rehearsals, where the directors never worked with the actors much, with no rigid shooting schedule, which were often spread out over several months.  In the old days, they didn’t even work with scripts.  Postproduction work was also very quick, with this film released in the theater just six weeks after shooting stopped, including editing and locking the picture, also the sound mixing, yet in the pre-Dolby era, this was among the longest in the director’s career, which accounts for fewer flaws.  Best Actress Award for Cheung, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Film, winner in 9 of 11 nominated categories at the 1997 Hong Kong Film Awards.

Written by Ivy Ho, the film overcomes genre categorizations and some of the sappy musical cues and cleverly mixes humor with nostalgia, all leading up to Hong Kong’s sovereign return to the Chinese mainland in 1997, which is initially eagerly anticipated, coinciding with a stock market surge, but also reality sets in as the market cools its heels just prior to the ultimate transfer back to the mainland.  Li Xiao-jun stays in a room provided by his Aunt Rosie (Irene Tsu), who runs a brothel and continually fantasizes about American actor William Holden, maintaining a shrine to him in her room, with an enlarged portrait surrounded by fan magazine clippings, while McDonald’s becomes a setting for international public relations, as learning English takes on a sudden significance in the job market, where the English teacher is none other than Hong Kong cinematographer par excellence Christopher Doyle, famous for his collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, chanting “die you bastard, die” as they watch an American cowboy movie.  Chan films the Tsim Sha Tsui, the most prosperous commercial district in Hong Kong, a bit differently than other filmmakers, reflective of different races and cultures, including a recurring image of the Opportunity Furniture Store, an abandoned storefront with a Sikh Indian sitting in front, or a white English teacher who couples with a Thai prostitute (Michelle Gabriel), and the low-budget shops of Chungking Mansions, an offbeat international landmark with its maze of shops and restaurants offering a look of multicultural diversity, also featured prominently in Wong Kar-wai’s CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994).  The film is immersed in a tender romanticism, accentuated by the songs of Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng, who actually becomes a subplot to the main narrative, as her songs are adored by the Chinese mainlanders who secretly bypass the official Chinese censorship of her music (banned as part of Deng Xiaoping’s Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign from 1983 until restrictions were lifted in 2015), while the more cosmopolitan residents of Hong Kong openly show disinterest while secretly adoring her music as well.  Teng becomes emblematic of the duality of a split nation, singing songs in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Indonesian, and English, bridging the international divide, fusing Western elements with classical Chinese, becoming the most popular Chinese singer in the world, where her music exudes a long sought after hope for freedom, a reminder of the émigré Chinese experience tinged with a nostalgia for all that was left behind.  Her tragic death during production at the early age of 42 inspired Chan to change the film’s Chinese title to one of her best known songs, which the young couple initially sing together while riding on his bicycle, Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) - Bike Scene YouTube (30 seconds), where a mutual love for her music mirrors their own attraction, like a unifying force, as the film is essentially an elegy to her music, 2013台北電影節｜甜蜜蜜 Comrades: Almost a Love Story YouTube (3:21).  On several occasions, Cheung somewhat ironically calls Lai by his official title, preceding his full name by the word comrade, a reminder of the mainland influence in their upbringing, but it also adds an element of personal intimacy to their relationship.  Westerners will most likely find that amusing, as it transforms communist ideology and becomes a term of endearment.  Also amusing is the repeated camera angle from inside an ATM machine, where both jostle in front of it to make transactions, where Cheung’s bank account becomes an accurate measurement for their lifted or deflated spirits.  But easily the most amusing element of the film is the use of Eric Tsang, noted for his legendary Hong Kong gangster roles, who is charmingly adorable and menacing at the same time, exerting a certain authority and presence, ordering mafia hits with complete nonchalance while instructing Cheung not to interrupt his back massage.  

Towards the end of the movie Aunt Rosie becomes increasingly ill, so Li Xiao-jun watches LOVE IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING (1955) on video, which was shot on location in Hong Kong, nominated for 8 Academy Awards, winning three, and learns more details about how she met Holden during the filming and had dinner with him at the famous Peninsula Hotel (3,264 × 2,448 pixels), with viewers remaining unsure whether this actually happened or is a wish fulfillment myth.  After her death, however, he discovers a trunk full of mementos from that evening, including a Peninsula Hotel menu and napkin, as well as photos with Holden and a woman resembling his aunt at a much younger age, yet her past, along with Hollywood’s historic relation to Hong Kong, simply evaporates over time.  Chan, a Second Wave filmmaker who was trained in film history, having understudied with John Woo after attending UCLA film school, cleverly integrates this storyline into a film about Chinese identity, where it’s important to realize how Hollywood viewed a very Westernized Hong Kong pre-transfer, believing it was created by white Westerners for white Western eyes, a reminder of the milestones of Hong Kong’s colonial history.  To that end, in 2000 Chan co-founded Applause Pictures in order to promote greater collaboration between Thailand, Korea, Japan, and Singapore, hoping to share talent and resources and also expand the regional and global distribution possibilities for new pan-Asian films.  Born and raised in Thailand, Chan offers a unique, somewhat internationalized Hong Kong perspective, reflective of the revulsion shown to mainlanders migrating from China to Hong Kong, still speaking Mandarin instead of the local Cantonese dialect, yet it’s also important to understand that nearly everyone in Hong Kong migrated from China, but they arrived in different time periods, suggesting there is a rootless status of Chinese people, disconnected perhaps by economic deprivation.  In homage of the social realist world of Jacques Demy, Chan beautifully combines realism into what amounts to a romantic love story, adding Demy’s charming use of missed opportunities in his lyrical pastiche The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort) (1967), where the couple, once separated, continually criss-cross past one another in a pattern of near misses as they go about their daily routines, so caught up in the humdrum of everyday life that they fail to notice the possibilities that might be waiting for them just around the corner, which is especially prevalent once they arrive in New York City, where the Chinatown district and racial diversity very closely resembles the look of the streets of Hong Kong.  This frustration allows the audience to anticipate any number of possibilities as well, not all of them happy outcomes, such as the utterly devastating scene where Lai reveals to his wife the truth about his unfaithful relationship with Cheung, or the vividly real moment in New York where a man’s entire life is reduced to a senseless murder, so by the time this story ends they are two lonely outsiders in a teeming metropolis.  Both are transfixed by a stream of television news reports playing in the storefront window of an electronics appliance store, paying tribute to the life and death of Teresa Teng, who once more magically brings them together again, their destiny apparently fulfilled, where there is a feeling that it truly earns this kind of remarkably choreographed finale, Comrades ~Almost a Love Story Ending Scene YouTube (10:53).  Grappling with the failures of both Chinese and American Dreams, this is a charming film that tugs at our emotions with what is easily one of Maggie Cheung’s most timeless and heart-wrenching performances, balanced by Lai’s soft spoken grace and naiveté, but also an intelligence and wit throughout that endears us to these characters and their lives, turning the world itself into a wonderful mosaic that actually matters to us more afterwards.

Watch Comrades: Almost a Love Story Full Movie ... - FshareTV  available for free online with multiple subtitle options (1:15:54) 

16th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards
• Winner - Best Picture
• Winner - Best Director (Peter Chan Ho-Sun)
• Winner - Best Actress (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk)
• Winner - Best Supporting Actor (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai)
• Winner - Best Screenplay (Ivy Ho)
• Winner - Best Cinematography (Jingle Ma Chor-Sing)
• Winner - Best Art Direction (Yee Chung-Man)
• Winner - Best Costume Design (Ng Lei-Lo)
• Winner - Best Original Music Score (Chui Jun-Fun)
• Nomination - Best Actor (Leon Lai Ming)
• Nomination - Best New Artist (Kristy Yeung Kung-Yu)

Song of the Exile (Ke tu qiu hen)

Director Ann Hui

 

SONG OF THE EXILE (Ke tu qiu hen)                    A-                                                             aka:  Autumnal Lament in Exile                                                                                                  Taiwan  Hong Kong  (100 mi)  1990  d: Ann Hui

Really, the one’s dearest to us are always furthest away.                                                       —Aiko (Lu Hsiao-fen)

In 2020, Ann Hui became the first woman director to win the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement from the Venice Film Festival.  Born in Manchuria to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, director Ann Hui’s parents moved to Macao and then Hong Kong, where she received a Master’s degree in English and comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, studying for two years at the London Film School where she wrote her graduate thesis on French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Returning to Hong Kong afterwards, she became an assistant to prominent Chinese filmmaker King Hu (one of the film’s producers), helping with the English subtitling of A Touch of Zen (Xia nü) (1971) before starting her career making socially conscious documentaries for television, including scripting, shooting, and editing, where the touchy subject of exposing the corruption and bribery of Chinese and British police officers was so controversial that several were banned from ever airing.  She became part of a group of young, groundbreaking New Wave Hong Kong filmmakers in the 1970’s and 80’s that included Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, and Yim Ho, creating films with a contemporary Hong Kong identity while using the Cantonese dialect, as opposed to Mandarin (dubbed over the original Cantonese), also introducing themes of displacement and migration.  With this film Hui took a feminist turn, using her own life as a basis of personal exploration, creating a bittersweet melodrama about how the past affects the present, surprisingly layered in its storytelling, beautifully shot by Zhiwen Zhong, using brief moments of poignant, yet nostalgic music by Chen Yang that bridges all national barriers, Song of the Exile - YouTube (4:08), becoming one of the better films on people of mixed cultures.  Written by Wu Nien-jen, who played NJ in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), and was also Hou Hsiao-hsien’s screenwriter during the 1980’s and 90’s, and co-writer of Yang’s THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983), the film traces the post-World War II life of a Japanese woman married to a Chinese nationalist soldier, her adolescent daughter’s discovery of her mother’s ethnicity, and their reconciliation as she accompanies her homesick mother back to her native town in Japan.  Moving between the past and the present through a series of extended flashbacks and voiceover narration, examining themes of home and exile, the story is set in the 1970’s and takes place across China, Britain, Macau, Hong Kong, and Japan.  The film explores the politics of difference between the film’s three major female characters, representing three generations, all of whom have differently constructed feminine boundaries.  Maggie Cheung as Hueyin is the child of a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, yet due to the influence of her nationalist Chinese grandparents constantly overriding her mother’s influence, stressing her Chinese roots, instilling a love of Chinese culture, such as language, literature, and food, she has always felt estranged from her mother, Aiko, brilliantly played by Taiwanese actress Lu Hsiao-fen, who keeps her Japanese identity concealed, lost in a divisive cloud of patriotic Chinese nationalism.  China and Japan were at war for the first half of the 20th century, where the Chinese suffered terribly from Japanese war atrocities, such as the Massacre and Rape of Nanking, The Nanking Massacre, 1937 - Internet History Sourcebooks, where Chinese nationalists were united in their hatred of the Japanese.       

First screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, and one of the first Hong Kong films to receive international recognition, this initial release came in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, when Hong Kong was in a state of heightened panic and extreme distrust over the impending handover to Communist sovereignty in 1997.  The film opens and closes with a bridge across water, where travel becomes a central theme of the film, both internally and externally, as bicycles, boats, buses, ferries, rickshaws, and trains are all part of the personal journeys undertaken by characters in the film where friends and family are often seen waving goodbye.  Set in the early 1970’s in the English language with the playing of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man (Live at the Newport Folk Festival. 1964) YouTube (5:55), Hueyin receives her Master’s degree in London, but is bypassed at her first job opportunity at the BBC, so she decides to take her mother’s advice to return home to Hong Kong for her younger sister’s wedding.  Immediately, she is out of place and uncomfortable with all the rigid and conforming demands of her mother, all seemingly a show for the neighbor’s sake to show family solidarity.  Unaware of how important this is to her mother, there is a flashback to Hueyin as a child in Macao, somewhat belligerent, disobedient, always ignoring her mother, running instead to the support of her grandparents, Xiang Xiao and Tien Feng, who refuse to scold her.  More and more, we see how out of place the mother is in Chinese society, how she is all but ignored, exiled within her own family while her husband works in Hong Kong, actually despised by the grandparents, as they associate her with the Japanese occupation of Canton which caused them to flee, where Hueyin is the last to learn her mother is of Japanese origin.  In a telling flashback, Hueyin remembers the time when her father (Waise Lee) returns to Macao to take his family to Hong Kong since Aiko found life so unbearable with the Chinese in-laws, but Hueyin refuses to leave her grandparents, so they leave without her, seen waving farewell from the window overlooking the street.  Aiko’s feelings of abandonment by her daughter mirrors her daughter’s later feelings of abandonment by her grandparents after they choose to return to mainland China, where in another flashback, we see the adolescent Hueyin in a bitter cultural misunderstanding with her parents after joining them in Hong Kong, which results in her attending boarding school, finding herself just as isolated there as she does later in London, where we never see but only hear about her father’s early demise.  As her younger daughter has moved to Canada, Aiko decides to return to Japan, longing to see her birthplace of Beppu on the island of Kyushu, and brings her daughter Hueyin along as a prize of success, again to impress the family and friends.  Interestingly, it is now the daughter’s turn to feel out of place, as she is lost in the exoticism of Japanese culture and a language she fails to understand—exactly, Aiko reminds her, as her mother felt in China for so many years—exiled, excluded and ignored.  But oddly enough, after having lived so long abroad, Aiko is never truly accepted back home in Japan either, where for both mother and daughter, Hong Kong becomes a home for the exiled, ascending out of the shadows of being a former colony of China, Britain, and Japan, reflecting an emerging Hong Kong identity.       

In a complete surprise, the majority of this joint Taiwanese/Hong Kong film takes place in Japan speaking Japanese language.  This is interesting, as Japan colonized Taiwan for 51 years, but withdrew at the end of WWII at a time when Taiwan was still fighting to regain the mainland.  This film all but ignores that aspect of history until near the end of the film and shows no malice or ill will towards the Japanese, who are depicted with the utmost respect, complete with religious customs and family shrines.  There is a wonderful Japanese sequence where Hueyin goes out on her own riding her bicycle through the countryside, but gets lost in a forest, in a style very closely resembling Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988), which depicts children on their own, lost, having to find their way.  In this case, Hueyin, unable to comprehend a word of Japanese, is caught stealing a tomato, and the neighbor chases her down, as if to harm her, but it is only to save her, as the tomato has been sprayed with pesticides.  She is paraded by curious neighbors into town, complete with a basket full of fresh tomatoes, only to meet a town translator, who wins the applause of the crowd when they finally understand one another.  Later flashbacks provide a more sympathetic view of the mother, as Aiko describes the heartbreaking story of how she met and fell in love with her husband, a Chinese nationalist army translator who helped her as she was about to be deported back to Japan at the end of the Sino-Japanese war, where love affairs from warring nations were a rare occurrence given the heightened xenophobia of the times.  But here it’s rendered as a beautiful, culturally interconnecting personal odyssey, turning into a tender moment of reconciliation between mother and daughter, where the real obstacle placed between them is the toxic effect of nationalism.  This heartrending moment is interrupted, however, when the mother is notified that the grandfather has had a stroke after being interrogated by the Red Guard.  Adding to Hueyin’s sense of estrangement is her trip to Canton to visit her dying grandfather who mistakenly returned to mainland China in hopes of being part of the dream of a unified China, but was instead questioned and tortured during the openly hostile suspicions of the Cultural Revolution, a vivid portrait of alienation within one’s own country, a subject similarly depicted in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwanese Good Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), but rarely seen in Hong Kong films.  At her grandfather’s bedside, shot in dark, claustrophobic lighting, Hueyin witnesses the stark poverty in Communist China for the first time and hears him describe the importance of a unified China, currently looking to individuals such as herself to help China find its way through the turmoil of its past, with Hueyin eventually finding a job as a journalist at a local television station.  The patriarchal men in the film are largely figureheads, powerless against the winds of change, offering instead an alternative world of strong and enduring women.  The final image is a somber shot of the bridge connecting Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, an image with personal and political implications, linking Hueyin to her grandparents on the mainland and Hong Kong to the mainland regime that would eventually reclaim Hong Kong in 1997.  Arguably the most haunting and poignant of Hui’s films, with a Hong Kong DVD that’s long been out of print, it remains a rare and hard to find film. 

Ke tu qiu hen (1990) AKA Song of the Exile  entire film available at Rare Films with English/Chinese subtitles, (1:39:04), or on YouTube here: Song of the Exile 1990