Daily Archives: December 16, 2022

On the Precipice of Hong Kong’s Past and Future: COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY and ROUGE

Written for the Metrograph Chronicle in January 2020. — J.R.

comrades_almost_a_love_story

rouge

There’s an unfortunate habit among some Yankee cinephiles — including distributors — to limit our perceptions of some overseas trends to single figures, so that Spanish cinema initially consisted of Luis Buñuel, then Pedro Almodóvar, Swedish cinema became synonymous with Bergman, and Hong Kong art cinema begins and ends with Wong Kar-wai. This helps to explain why I haven’t had much luck in keeping up with the careers of two other favorites of mine among Hong Kong directors, Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Stanley Kwan, whose finest work is every bit as important to me as Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. If you haven’t yet seen Chanr’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story and/or Kwan’s Rouge, they’ll do a good job of suggesting what you might be missing.

Rouge, made in 1987, is set alternately in that year and in 1934. Comrades, Almost a Love Story, another Hong Kong not-quite romance shaped around two superstars, was made in 1996, opens in 1986, and ends first in Manhattan in 1995, then back again in 1986, when the title characters are arriving in Hong Kong, still strangers to the city and to each other. Read more

Intimate Passions: Rotterdam 1992

From Sight and Sound (March 1992). –- J.R.

There was a discernible change of emphasis this year’s Rotterdam

Festival under its new director, Emile Fallaux. Certainly, there were

fewer intellectual and scholarly interests than in the reign of Marco

Müller, who has moved on to Locarno,although the creation of a new

organization called ‘The Limits of Liberty’ to promote free expression

for filmmakers (somewhat after the model of PEN) signaled a new

activist impulse. With selections now made by a team of Dutch

programmers rather than a single individual, Rotterdam has arguably

become more of a Dutch event than it was under the extended rule of

the late Hubert Bals, who tended to shun native product. But one welcome

constant is a passionate defense of the marginal and surreptitious, and

an overall sense of equality that puts studio tyros and independents on

the same footing.

One of the most striking films this year was Zhang Yuan’s Mama, an

independently Made, banned work from mainland China about

mentally handicapped children. Alternating between an emotionally

subdued fictional story in black and white about a mother and her

retarded son and highly emotional documentary interviews in color

video with the real-life counterparts, the film sets up a neo-Brechtian

strategy with complex dividends.

Read more