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| Sylvia Chang and Kenny Bee in Shanghai Blues |
Cast: Kenny Bee, Sylvia Chang, Sally Yeh, Ching Tien, Loletta Lee, Fu-On Shing, Manfred Wong, Ging-Man Fung, Woo Fung, Lung Kong. Screenplay: Chan Koon-Chung, Szeto Cheuk-Hon, Raymond To. Production design: Ah-Yeung Hing-Yee. Film editing: Chew Siu Sum. Music: James Wong.
Tsui Hark's zany slapstick rom-com Shanghai Blues begins with the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937. Two young people, Tung Kwok-Man (Kenny Bee) and Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang) take shelter under a bridge and hit it off immediately. As he runs off to join the army and she goes in search of her family, they vow to meet again in the same place in ten years. The setup made me try to imagine an American version, set perhaps during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the cognitive dissonance was too great. But their reunion in Shanghai after the war is a more familiar situation: The city was undergoing economic upheaval not unlike that of the Great Depression, a setting more like that of many screwball comedies of the 1930s. It was dark under that bridge, so neither of them has a clear image of the person they vowed to meet again, so true to romantic comedy they don't recognize each other when they happen to wind up in the same rundown apartment building. He's a struggling musician, and she's a dancer in a nightclub. She also has a comic sidekick who takes on the nickname translated as "Stool" (it probably makes more sense in Chinese), who is played with fine goofiness by Sally Yeh. She falls in love with Tung, of course. The rest is a melange of mistaken identities, mixed signals, chases, farcical near-encounters, some smutty jokes, and almost any gag and sitcom trope Hark and his screenwriters can wedge into the movie. Shanghai Blues is undeniably funny, but it's also a little exhausting.
