Hong Kong’s Stanley Kwan’s time-traveling ghost story on love, loss & redemption is told with breathtaking simplicity and even rarer lucidity. Leslie Cheung & Anita Mui are beautiful & doomed as an unequally matched couple in the early 1930s. HER: refined, luxury-grade prostitute in Hong Kong’s still legal brothels; HIM: Scion of a wealthy business family, the ‘Twelfth-Master’ in his house. Between opium-laced love, they languorously plan marriage as he starts an unlikely apprenticeship at the Chinese Opera, a literal pipe-dream that can’t win over family objections. Despairing, the couple agree to a suicide pact. Fifty years later, Mui returns to Hong Kong as a ghost, at sea in modern society, depending on the kindness of strangers to reach her scheduled meeting with her soon-to-return ghostly love. That’s newspaper employee Alex Man as the 'kind stranger,' pointing the way as he slowly realizes he’s helping a corporeal ectoplasm to her destiny thru the Want Ads at his newspaper job. Eventually joined by his no-nonsense girlfriend Emily Chu, they’ll learn that ultra-romantic reality can be brutally anti-romantic. Working with rich color for the past, and naturalism in the present (and what a pleasure to see the past rendered more vividly than the present for a change!), the story & script (Kang-Chien Chiu; Pik-Wah Lee) move in unexpected directions thru an acceptance of the paranormal that is catching. With Kwan cleverly handling it via editing & composition rather than strenuous Special Effects*, it easily hits the top ranks of his output.
DOUBLE-BILL: *For another nearly Special Effects-free ghost story, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s enchanting THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR/’47.
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