A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Rouge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rouge. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Rouge (Stanley Kwan, 1987)

Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in Rouge

Cast: Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, Alex Man, Emily Chu, Irene Wan, Tam Sin-Hung, Chu Shui-Tong. Screenplay: Lee Pik-Wah, Chiu Kang-Chien, based on a novel by Lee. Cinematography: Bill Wong. Production design: Pan Lai, Horace Ma. Film editing: Peter Cheung. Music: Lai Siu-Tin.

Stanley Kwan's Rouge is a bittersweet love story about a ghost in search of the man who joined her in a suicide pact half a century earlier. Fleur (Anita Mui) and Chan (Leslie Cheung) overdosed on opium after Chan's well-to-do parents refused his request to marry Fleur, who worked in a Hong Kong brothel. Failing to find him in the afterlife, Fleur enters the world of the living, appearing one day in a newspaper office, wanting to place an ad in hope that it will somehow get his attention. Yuen (Alex Man), who takes her request, is initially frightened to discover that she's a ghost, but her plight intrigues him. He enlists his girlfriend, Chor (Emily Chu), in an attempt to reunite Fleur with Chan. They succeed, but not without some surprise narrative twists. Kwan maintains a nice variation of tone in the film, from languorous to comic, with the substantial help of the quartet of actors.    


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