Gungun hongchen
Hong Kong,
1990, 94 min
Shown in 1991
CREDITS
- dir
-
Yim Ho
- prod
-
Hsu Feng
- scr
-
Echo Chen De Quero, Yim Ho
- cam
-
Poon Hang-seng
- editor
-
Sammy Chow
- cast
-
Lin Ching-hsia, Chin Han, Maggie Cheung, Richard Ng
- source
-
Creative Workshop Ltd.
-
COMMENTS
One of three Opening Night films. Yim Ho in person.
OTHER
Director Yim Ho (Homecoming, SFIFF, 1985; Buddha's Lock, SFIFF 1987) has taken a favorite Asian genre, the soap opera, and amped it up into an epic, over-the-top romantic melodrama set against a background of war and revolution in 20th century China. (Over-the-top in accolades also, Red Dust swept the recent Golden Horse Awards.) The film's story begins in 1938 when an eccentric writer, Shen Shaohua, falls in love with one of her readers, Zhang Nengcai, a cultural officer and collaborator with the occupying Japanese forces. In spite of the taboos of such a relationship, and the estrangement of her best friend Yuefeng (whose own lover is a resistance fighter), their romance continues. When the Japanese surrender, Nengcai must leave, plunging Shaohua into despair and bringing Yuefeng back into her life. The film grows in scope, from the intimacy of the two lovers and the two sisterly friends to the tumultuous civil war tearing China apart, as the lovers' fates continue to intertwine. And intertwined within the film itself is one of Shaohua's own stories, a tender, old-fashioned romance between two peasants, Jade Flower and Spring Hope, reminding us of the film's roots in the traditional Asian melodrama. Exquisitely photographed and acted, the film has all the sweep of a Chinese Doctor Zhivago—ordinary people caught up in world-changing events.
—Tod Booth
FACTOID #75
Italian screen siren and ’60s sex symbol Sophia Loren appeared in two films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Ettore Scola’s A Special Day in 1977 and Francesco Rosi’s More Than a Miracle in 1981.
