Movie Reviews: 胭脂扣 (1987)

胭脂扣 (1987)

intro

1934年的香港，红牌妓女如花与纨绔子弟十二少陈振邦的爱情。

50年后的香港，报社记者袁永定与阿楚的爱情。

前者是，悬殊的阶级差别，父母反对的婚姻，双双说好为爱而死，结果一个没死成，一个又来阳间找。

后者是，都坦言不会为对方自杀，马路上两人并排走着，一人走到马路对面另一人还不觉察。也不用生气，走回来还可以挽着手。

爱情真的分年代，30年代的非要一起，80年代不如一起。

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等你打完牌。

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为你放烟花。

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如梦如幻月，若即若离花。

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然而3811打不通，戏楼变咗7-11。

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胭脂扣就还给那个老头吧，重新投胎，换个人爱。

rottentomatoes.com

newyorker.com

The high styles and narrow mores of bygone days meet the melancholy of changing times in Stanley Kwan’s romantic drama “Rouge,” from 1987, which screens at bam in a new restoration Oct. 21-27. (It’s also streaming on the Criterion Channel.) The story is set in Hong Kong, where, in 1934, a courtesan and singer called Fleur (Anita Mui) and an industrial heir named Chen-Pang (Leslie Cheung), who aspires to be an actor, fall in love. When Chen-Pang’s family won’t let them marry, they carry out a suicide pact. Then, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fleur—who hasn’t aged a day—shows up in dated finery at a newspaper office to place an ad in search of Chen-Pang. “Rouge” is a naturalistic ghost story, in which the flesh-and-blood revenant befriends two young journalists (Alex Man and Emily Chu), gets a tour of her drastically altered old neighborhoods, and hunts for traces of her past life. Kwan renders the thirties in florid images and modern times in muted tones; his view of the shock of history feels all the more prescient in light of recent repressive changes in Hong Kong.

— Richard Brody

artforum.com

June 22, 2022 • Alex Kong

UNHAPPY TOGETHER

Stanley Kwan’s Rouge and the end of history

REAL THINGS ARE ALWAYS UGLY. Murmured by a character in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), these words double as a commentary on the director’s broader filmography, marked by restless expeditions across the gossamer boundary between fiction and reality. Content at times to dwell inside comforting, cathartic artifices, such as the thundering melodrama of Lan Yu (2001), at others Kwan turns a more skeptical eye on the conventions of genre, as in his snaking metafiction Center Stage (1991). This conflicted attitude toward the templates prescribed by commercial filmmaking was characteristic of the New Wave that rippled through Hong Kong’s movie industry starting in the early 1980s, one that included Wong Kar-wai and, in its earlier phase, Ann Hui and Tsui Hark. Exemplary of this movement, Rouge finds Kwan borrowing the structure of a ghost story to explore how the pressures of modernity penetrate and reshape even the deepest regions of one’s innermost desires. 

Fleur (Anita Mui), a courtesan, falls for a wealthy heir named Chen-bong (Leslie Cheung) amid the opium-soaked luxury of the 1930s. Thwarted by his disapproving parents, the lovers plan to kill themselves together and reunite in the afterlife. During this fever dream, an abrupt cut to the glittering Hong Kong skyline hits like a splash of cold water, crashing through the voluptuous exuberance of the past to reveal an austere, sepulchral present. The camera swivels here to a different couple, Yuan and Chu (Alex Man and Emily Chu), a pair of eminently reasonable journalists who couldn’t be farther removed from the self-destructive Fleur and Chen-bong. One night, Fleur appears under the harsh fluorescence of the newsroom to place an ad for a missing person. Chen-bong has stood her up in hell, and fifty years after her suicide, she’s returned to the mortal realm to find him.

Fleur’s ghostly condition is peculiar, rendered with a specificity that recalls the multifarious variety of spirits enumerated in Chinese folklore. Her theatrical makeup and iridescent cheongsam flag her as ontologically out of joint with her surroundings, like a cardboard cutout placed before a scenic landscape.The material world tries to spit her out at every turn. She can’t be exposed to daylight, and when she tries to take a bite from an apple, a fount of blood spurts alarmingly from her mouth. But neither is she wholly spectral, gifted with the ability to walk through walls. The mechanics of her embodiment are more mysterious; sometimes able to traverse a room with superhuman speed, at other times she’s burdened by the weight and textures of corporeality (at one point, Chu caresses Fleur’s cheongsam, praising the fabric’s quality.) Rather than hovering beyond the physical universe, she seems to nestle tentatively inside it, her ghostliness an unstable alloy of past and present.

In this way, Fleur has much in common with Hong Kong as it is portrayed by Kwan, who eschews the kind of nostalgic longing familiar from the films of Wong Kar-wai for something more original. In the fifty years since Fleur’s death, the city-state has undergone a drastic transformation (for starters, the brothel where she worked has been replaced by an elementary school). But Kwan’s vision of a modernizing Hong Kong is marked less by a clean wiping away of what came before than by the stubborn, lingering pockets of a recalcitrant antiquity. In a thrift shop, Yuan and Chu find a newspaper that carries Fleur’s 1934 obituary. The shopkeeper points out that those tabloids, once worthless, now enjoy the status of artifacts from a bygone era. The speed of progress results in a relentless cycling of Hong Kong’s physical affordances, whereby they simply “do not stand long enough to acquire the feeling of permanence that in turn gives way to nostalgia before they too are demolished,” as the cultural critic Rey Chow has written. What Yuan and Chu discover is not just a clue that unlocks the mystery of Chen-bong’s whereabouts, but also a mongrel temporality deformed by capitalism, in which the present has arrived before the remnants of the past have even decomposed.

And as they proceed deeper into the city, it becomes clear that the amphetamine pace of historical change has transformed not only the concrete environs of Hong Kong, but the interior terrain of its denizens as well. What at once troubles and tantalizes the modern couple is the reckless intensity of Fleur and Chen-bong’s ardor; their attempts to understand it brush up against a beguiling otherness that defeats their comprehension. They ask each other, “Would you commit suicide for me? Would we be that romantic?” No.The defoliated and cautious affections of modern love inevitably pale against Fleur’s all-consuming desire. (Kwan’s emotional topology of neoliberalism contrasts with that of his contemporary Johnnie To, whose spectacular two-part rom-com Don’t Go Breaking My Heart envisions the hypercapitalist fantasia of Hong Kong’s financial sector as an arena for unleashing masculine virility in cartoonishly titanic proportions.) At one point, lying in bed, Yuan and Chu become so aroused just by discussing Fleur’s plight, vicariously imagining what they would have done in her position, that they end up having sex—the first time we’ve seen this couple evince anything resembling physical attraction.For Kwan, the lurid dramas of history function as stimulants for modernity’s neutered passions.

Fleur eventually finds and confronts Chen-bong, who turns out to have survived the suicide attempt, going on to squander his family’s fortune. The trio finds him straggling along as an extra on the set of a wuxia movie. That he would end up in the film industry, of all places, suggests an effort to recapture the Technicolor vibrancy of a vanished era, the glories of cinema compensating for a dull and disappointing present at the end of history. Kwan sharpens this self-reflexive critique further by aiming it squarely at the viewer of his own film. As Fleur approaches Chen-bong, Kwan intermittently cuts away to reverse shots of Yuan and Chu breathlessly watching the drama before them unfold—framing these characters, in a Hitchcockian gambit straight out of Rear Window, as moviegoers in front of a screen. If we’ve already seen the consummatory power that this kind of voyeurism exerts over the young couple, Kwan now turns the lens around on us: inviting us to consider the question, suddenly and unnervingly personal, of how cinema salves the ugliness of real things.

Rouge was rereleased by the Criterion Collection on June 21.

slantmagazine.com

by Jake Cole July 14, 2022

Review: Stanley Kwan’s Hong Kong New Wave Melodrama Rouge on Criterion Blu-ray

Criterion offers a sumptuous release of Stanley Kwan’s dense, masterful melodrama.

Stanley Kwan’s Rouge begins as a delicate romantic drama set in the dwindling glory days of Hong Kong’s teahouses. Amid lavish parlors populated by wealthy men and fawning courtesans, Chen Chen-pang (Leslie Cheung), meets a twentysomething courtesan, Fleur (Anita Mui), and the two build an easy rapport across a series of teasing games of mutual flattery rooted in centuries-old traditions of courtship.

Through it all, cinematographer Bill Wong’s camera seemingly dances after Chen and Fleur as they play their game of cat and mouse, delighting in the surroundings and the love that blossoms between them. So enchanting is this opening that it becomes all the more jarring when the film jumps to 1987 Hong Kong to find Fleur, still unaged and wearing a florid cheongsam, standing in a newspaper office inquiring about placing a classified ad in order to locate Chen. In short order, it’s revealed that we’re watching the ghost of the courtesan, who, more than 50 years after she and Chen committed suicide by opium overdose, is seeking to reunite with his spirit.

This revelation ignites a time-hopping romance in which the doomed relationship between a high-society, wealthy heir and a lowly, socially undesirable courtesan is at once venerated and criticized. Fleur and Chen’s story contrasts with that of Yuen (Alex Man), the reporter who first encounters Fleur’s ghost at his office, and his girlfriend, fellow journalist Chor (Emily Chu). After the two get used to the shock of being around a dead woman, Yuan and Chor slowly become infatuated with the details that Fleur shares about her relationship with Chen.

As Fleur relates her story of romance (glimpsed in various flashbacks), the depths of her and Chen’s love prompts Yuen and Chor to re-evaluate their own feelings for one another. In one scene, each asks if the other would die for them, and both are at once relieved and vaguely hurt that the other says no. In such moments, we understand how the constricting rules of conduct that determine specific behavior among the older society’s members can result in explosive and desperate love affairs, and how more relaxed modern customs around dating can make couples like Yuan and Chor feel so comfortable that they’re effectively cut off from the most intense parts of themselves.Rouge is as much an examination of the pros and cons of each approach to love as the tale of Fleur searching for her lover’s spirit.

Rouge flows back and forth between a colorful and ornate past and a drab, steely present. Tellingly, a bridge of sorts between these eras lies in Chen’s family home, where Fleur is summoned by his mother (Tam Sin-hung), who expresses her disapproval of her son’s choice of a partner. The parlor where the woman meets Fleur is windowless and dark, lit only by the faintly visible daylight pouring in from an adjacent room, and the spartan decoration of the setting suggests that the mother purposefully met her would-be daughter-in-law in the least welcoming spot of her house. The moment Fleur enters the room, she knows where the conversation will head, and she deflates into the hollowed figure we see in the present.

The darker hues and dimmer lighting scheme of the present-day scenes are befitting of this story of alienation. Fleur regularly floats into the frame in total silence, her face so underlit that she looks gray and translucent behind the living characters. Mui was an electrifying pop star and an action film staple, but here she delivers an eerily still performance in the present-day scenes, speaking with deadpan flatness and moving with deliberate slowness. Even when Fleur laughs warmly from a cherished memory, her eyes remain cold and expressionless. Her distanced quality in the present contrasts with her demonstrative passion in the past, which is matched by Cheung’s sensual, delicate performance as Chen, who at times has the same coquettish, graceful movements as the courtesans who gawk at him.

With its use of overlapping time, its sumptuous and humid colors, and occasional futzing with frame rates to create hyperreal motion, Rouge anticipates the work of Wong Kar-wai. Yet the film’s denouement in some respects hits harder than Wong’s more poetic stories of heartbreak, in part because of the heavier emphasis on social commentary, as one can see class and gender roles ultimately assert control over even those who defy them.Rouge is also a commentary on Hong Kong’s ever-changing nature as it neared the 1997 handoff from the U.K. to China, positioning Fleur as displaced in more ways than one as a relic of a time unrecognizable to those living a mere half-century later. Kwan’s most direct statement on this point naturally involves cinema. At one point, Fleur asks Yuan about a movie theater she used to frequent, and we see a hazy mental picture of her memory of the palatial building, only for Yuan to explain that it’s now a store as the image cuts sharply to the empty glow of a 7-11.

Image/Sound

Criterion’s Blu-ray captures the full range of Rouge’s dual narrative. The bright colors of the 1930s scenes are radiant and warm, while the darker, drabber contemporary scenes show consistent stability in much lower light conditions. Unrestored clips of the film in some of the bonus features testify to just how detail-rich this transfer is; the soft, faded look that’s common to essential but little seen films of Hong Kong cinema is a ghost that’s nowhere to be seen here. The sound comes in both the original mono and a 5.1 surround remix, and while both presentations are crisp, the latter boasts a greater variance of ambiance, be it from the musical score and regular intrusion of Chinese opera or the din of modern urban life.

Extras

The disc comes with two 1997 films by Stanley Kwan: the essayistic Still Love You After All These and the documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema. Each explores Hong Kong’s social and cinematic history while also considering both the filmmaker’s sexuality and the general depiction of sexual identity in Chinese cinema. Still Love You After All These mixes clips from Kwan’s filmography with archival footage of Hong Kong to craft a personalized, subjective city symphony. Kwan’s narration constantly likens his sexual identity to Hong Kong’s own uncertain sense of self, and in many respects the short can be seen as the preemptive Hong Kong answer to the Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City. Yang ± Yin is a more objective account of sexuality in Chinese cinema with observations of gender roles and expressions of intimacy that have always existed in Chinese art and could be read as queer. A new interview with Kwan details his entire career, while a thorough booklet essay by critic Dennis Lim unpacks the aesthetic and thematic richness of the film’s ghost story.

Overall

Criterion offers a sumptuous release of Stanley Kwan’s dense and masterful Rouge, and bolsters it with two additional, fascinating films as bonuses.

asianmoviepulse.com

Panos Kotzathanasis May 5, 2021 4 Min Read

Film Review: Rouge (1988) by Stanley Kwan

Having a movie that revolves around a tragic love story whose actual protagonists and Hong Kong cinema legends tragically died 15 years later (Leslie Cheung committed suicide and Anita Mui died of cervical cancer, both in 2003) have deemed “Rouge” a legendary film. Apart from its non-cinematic significance, “Rouge” was an international and local success, winning six awards in from Hong Kong festival (including ones for Best Picture, Director and Actress) and a plethora of others in festivals all over the world.

The script is based on the homonymous novel by Lilian Lee, and unfolds in two periods. The first one takes place during 1934, when we are introduced to Fleur, a high-class, extremely popular courtesan and Chan Chen-pang, a rich playboy who frequented the opium dens of Hong Kong at the time. The two meet and soon fall in love, but his family objects to the affair. In their desperation, the two lovers decide to commit suicide and meet again in the afterlife.

The second period takes place 50 years later, when a disgruntled Fleur, that has been waiting for her lover all that time, decides to return to the world and search for him. She decides to place a newspaper advertisement for that purpose, and she ends up receiving help by the owner, Yuen, and his initially suspicious girlfriend, Chor.

If one were to use three words to define “Rouge”, they would definitely be nostalgia, drama, and style. The first term revolves around Hong Kong and the huge changes it experienced in the 50 years the story unfolds in, with Stanley Kwan filling the narrative with a rather romantic and somewhat glorified image of the past, at least regarding the courtesans and the opium dens. “People used to pay to touch my neck,” says Fleur to Yuen at one point, in a rather indicative statement of this particular aspect. Drama, however, is what remains from both timelines, with the glorification of the past eventually giving its place to the harsh realization of the then societal norms, while the film’s finale cements this element in the most impactful way.

Style refers mostly to the visuals of the movie, although the pretentiousness both Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui portray their characters with in the past arc is one of the style-defining factors of the film. Bill Wong’s cinematography captures the essence of both time frames, (the “lazy”, opium filled, seemingly idyllic of the past and the rather “flat” of the present) with artistry and realism. His images benefit the most by both acting and appearance of the two protagonists, while the way particularly Anita Mui is framed could be described as the visualization of a love poem, whose writers are both the cinematographer and the director. Furthermore, she thrives though this approach, highlighting a number of opposite character traits (happiness, sadness, despair, cockiness, and “submission”) with the same artistry, in a truly great performance that anchors the film as much as her beauty. Leslie Cheung is also quite good in his playboy pretentiousness, although the center stage is reserved for Mui. In comparison, Alex Man as Yuen and Emily Chu as Ah Chor seem rather flat, but then again their part is mostly complimentary, although their interaction with the ghost that invades their lives is the main source of the minor comedy elements in the film.

The score and the main theme, written by Lai Tin-Siu and performed by Anita Mui are also great, in perfect resonance with the film’s aesthetics. Peter Cheung’s editing allows the film to unfold in a relatively slow pace, that seems to suit the first arc better, but in general, works quite well with the general style of the movie.

Not much more to say, “Rouge” is one of the best movies ever to come out of Hong Kong, a triumph of style and drama, and a must-watch for every fan of cinema.

dennisschwartzreviews.com

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz REVIEWED ON 3/19/99 GRADE: A

“This is a visually appealing Hong Kong ghost story film.”

ROUGE (YIN JI KAU)(director: Stanley Kwan; screenwriter: Li Pak-Wah; cinematographers: Anita Mui/Bill Wong; editor: Peter Cheung; cast: Anita Mui (Fleur), Alex Man (Yuen), Emily Chu (Ah Chor), Leslie Cheung (Chan Chen-Pang); Runtime: 93; Golden Way; 1987-Hong Kong)

This is a visually appealing Hong Kong ghost story film, that is highly stylized, told from the perspective of a courtesan, Anita Mui (Fleur). She committed suicide from an over-dose of opium and sleeping pills; she also gave the deadly dosage to her unsuspecting male suitor, Leslie Cheung (Chan Chen-Pang), in 1934. It was at a time when his wealthy parents would not allow him to marry her, but he continued seeing her despite his parents’ protests and was thereby cut off from the family wealth. Her plan was that — she would rather be with her lover in hell than to not be with him in this world. But things didn’t work out as she expected and she never met him in hell; she did not know that he survived.

We now see her as a wraith in a modern and thoroughly changed Hong Kong, a place that leaves her confused. She tries to contemplate the different changes in the city 50-years later and enters a newspaper advertisement office hoping to place an ad in the paper to locate master 12, as she used to call him, believing that he is now reincarnated in this world and she will locate him by tracing the places he would frequent.

The film is evocative; its strength lying mostly in its poetical presentation, as it masterfully weaves a visual work of great scope and intelligence. The essence of the story does not depend on whether you believe in ghosts or not, though it would help if you would not be entirely reluctant to accept the possibility that there could be a life-after-death. The film’s plot is based on the knowledge that everything in life is transitory, that even love is questionable when thought of in eternal terms.

Fleur, still dressed as a 1930s courtesan would be dressed, appears out of place in this modern capitalistic society that has forgotten not only its ancient roots but its recent past. She befriends the perplexed young head of the ad office, Alex Man (Yuen), who becomes frightened when she follows him home after work, and he realizes that she is not human. He is, only, too human, living with his cute girlfriend Emily Chu (Ah Chor), who is a reporter on the newspaper. When Yuen tells her he took this strange woman back to their place she is, at first, jealous, then her curiosity gets the better of her as she examines her and discovers Fleur does not have a heartbeat. She listens to her story; and, thereby, agrees to help Fleur track down her missing lover; though she has horrible feelings about what Fleur did, not believing suicide is needed as a proof for love.The contrasts between old and new Hong Kong is accomplished in a very revealing manner, as the young couple come to look at their relationship in a deeper way than they ever had before and look back on a Hong Kong that no longer exists with the help of their ghostly guide.

This film fascinated me on many levels but, mainly, it made me wonder about unfulfilled expectations in this world and how the netherworld could really exist as a domain for such things that remain unresolved. It questioned what it is one really believes in and how easy it is to stray from what one believes in. It allows us the opportunity to ask ourselves, if we can really believe in spiritual things without being spiritual? Can love be so enduring to last forever? Is there something worth dying for?

This is truly one of the best films to come out of Hong Kong in the modern era. Even its ironical ending, is handled with great dignity and care; and, even if, you are not convinced by the logic of this super-natural tale, the beauty of its characterization is enough to make up for any shortcomings you might have thought this film had; such as, the improbability of a ghost being so openly seen by everyone.

#Metoo. 普通人，爱得普通，也是普通幸福。

其实背景不同这件事，张生答过的。玩笑放一边，“兩個人可唔可以行得埋一齊有好多因素，首先你鍾意佢係鍾意佢個人定係佢個世界嘅全部。”

很显然如花是只鍾意十二少呢個人，佢嘅世界远远不及如花触碰。单纯中意一个人是喜欢，能接受一个人的全部大概才是爱。这样想来如花为爱殉情也不过是想把情人占为私有。可是爱情怎么会不自私。

好啦大家都早d瞓！快d好翻！