| Okay so I'll write up some sort of rough movie review.
So I ended up watching Comrade, Almost a Love Story starring Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung last Friday by myself on my laptop (rather willingly since M was busy and I preferred to watch it alone and J wouldn't like this type of movie anyway, don't worry, it wasn't all that pathetic of a situation ;p). I bought the DVD to this movie. This is a *big* deal. I never buy DVDs. I think I have Jeff's Karaoke DVD and a few that were given to me and that's it. I never buy movies. I'd much rather watch them again in the theatre or just rent them again (although I seldom do either) than buy them. So why did I buy this one? Because it came highly recommended to me by two people within a very short space of time. I don't remember the English titles to HK flicks (because I never bother to find out what they are anyway) so when I asked R (the uber film buff, the film producer) what his favorite Chinese-speaking films were, he said this one. I looked it up quickly of course and realized I had seen it before with M when it first came out (a film buff herself) and did in fact, like it. However, I would never have said it was my favorite HK film because I just find Leon so utterly unremarkable and much prefer Maggie by herself (like in Centre Stage). Anyway, after learning it was R's recommendation I was already pretty set on re-viewing it, but when Mark said it was also one of his favorite Chinese films (all this within something like 2 weeks), well, that just cemented it. I figured what the hell, let's purchase a copy, it was only $13 or so anyway.
Upon watching it again, my first impression was that it was a lot funnier than I had remembered. Quirky, really. Like Leon using the McDonald's paper mats to write letters to his girlfriend back home. Him dressed up a suit to "interview" for the butcher's delivery boy position. Offering Qiao a ride on his bicycle, the lone relaxed cyclist in a zoo of angry revving automobiles. Haha, completely believable, I mean, I myself used to collect McDonald's coffee stirrers (they were pretty little shovel-like things, ok? I don't know what I was going to use them for ...) and candy wrappers (my first Halloween was fruitful in more ways than one =). I could ride my aunt's adult-sized bicycle when I was 5, as could every other kid in China. Chinese businessmen visitors from the less prosperous regions in China still wear western suits everywhere they go in the U.S., not realizing that there is such a thing as western casual wear. Leon's mandarin was poor though, and that killed some of the credibility of the film. I was also a little annoyed that the subtitles kept on referring to his hometown as Wu-xi, but in speech him and his fiancee both said Tian-jing. ?? I almost thought it was intentional, to show the glaring gap that still remained between HK and the mainland, so wide that an entire professional film production company could not catch this blatant error. I suppose to them, Tian-jing and Wu-xi are one and the same, both cities in far-away China, a land too large for them to comprehend, or really, I guess more importantly, a place they would've liked to wish out of existence. The prejudice against mainlanders hurt to watch, because I, like many others, encountered not some small form of that here, in the U.S.
The 80s marked some desperate times for many, the Cultural Revolution having recently ended and the people so thoroughly disillusioned that they would do anything to escape, get away from living in a world where fear was the only constant. What can I say ... I was aware of all this the first time I watched the film, because I remember discussing with M that there was likely a political agenda behind it (it came out right after/around 1997, which was, of course, the handover, and many films all of a sudden starred or had some mainland subject matter in it, and Leon's fiancee in this film was a mainlander in her debut role) but it struck me harder this time, how much of an immigrant movie this was. Of course, being a romance, it does not probe in depth the traumatic experience of immigrating to a new country, Leon and Maggie look far too well-fed and rosy-skinned for their roles, and no truly ill fates befall them as they are somehow able to skirt around all the most dangerous pitfalls of modern-day HK. But hey, the film is named Tian Mi Mi (Sweet as Honey, or something to that effect =), and I can remember well enough from my own experiences and the experiences of my parents to need validation on the silver screen. Immigration is not a condition you grow out of, especially if you were leaving China in the 80s, or any other developing/yet-to-develop (ha!) country, I suppose.
One thing about the film that surprised me was how quickly Leon and Maggie's characters fell for each other. For some reason I had remembered their love to be much more shy, slow-progressing, subtle, and well, traditional. OK, so I would've re-written that part I think, because I didn't think it was consistent with the initial portrayal of Leon as bumbling, stupid, happy-go-lucky, and well, really really provincial. But maybe I'm just biased and I like the more tortured, unconsummated love stories ... I mean, how much worse can you get than Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence? =) I think the lovers in each of those stories get one kiss respectively ;p. As it was a Teresa Teng dominated soundtrack, I thought it would've been more fitting if their love story unveiled itself more slowly than it did. OK so not as slowly as in the pre-Revolution Chinese stories where the girl shyly drops a handkerchief and the young man who picks it up, sniffs the heavenly scented powder, and in the briefest of glimpses that he catches of her angelic face suddenly becomes lovestruck and pines away until her next annual outing in order to retrieve by the roadside another memento of her ... well, existence. That is a little perverse. But I'm digressing. I just wish they wouldn't have always been checking into a love motel, a rather callous way of proclaiming their love for each other, don't you think?
Anyway, one last comment about the film. I really liked the Teresa Teng touch. I actually never heard of Teresa until I came to America (the Communists deemed her soft-melodied love ballads subversive and pornographic, yes, Teresa Teng the Siren dulling our revolutionary senses with auditory soft porn, lol =D and thus corrosive to the soul ... ! for one did not sing of anything but love for one's country, people, and the Party back then, and so filled to the brim were our hearts with such grandiose emotions that we naturally did not have any room for the love between a man and a woman ;p). Aiya ... basically I've never listened to her carefully until her death, which was the day I realized that she was not some pre-Revolutionary singer (I always thought she was of the same generation as Zhou Xuan, of the 1930s) but a modern-day artist, and only 42 when she passed away (her fame had so long endured and her songs so quaint that she did not seem to me to be of the 20th century ...). I still remember the day they broadcasted her death, and my mom inexplicably began crying, although as far as I knew, no one in my family was an ardent fan or anything. I guess it just struck her how utterly grotesque Teresa's death was, the always smiling and demure Teresa, collapsing naked in the hallways of a foreign hotel room, her suspiciously sullen French boyfriend nowhere to be found, the last strangled words out of her mouth, "Mama!" =( It is difficult to reconcile the lively, sweet-faced girl with the deathly images they printed in the newspapers (yes, they had to defile her in her death, with pictures of her naked unmoving corpse filling the front pages, such bastards!). Her death truly marked the end of an era, the end of innocence. Sadly, that was when I became a fan. I don't see how you can *not* be a Teresa fan. She sings singularly well, flawlessly really, with the sweetest voice and (at least the appearance of, although I am convinced it is not just skin-deep) the sweetest disposition. But yes, I can also understand that her style is too "backward" for those embroiled in the cosmopolitan lifestyle such as HKies. This all goes back to the prejudice against mainlanders, which is not a little amusing here, because Teresa is a pro-independence Taiwanese. She just so happened to catch the imagination of the mainland Chinese. What can I say ... us mainlanders may not be the trendiest, but our idols, well, they are sculpted out of raw talent, not looks, costumes, or other such nonsense, and as in the case of Teresa, they have endured. Her music sells well in China even now. We do not let our idols go easily, I tell you. I love Teresa and her innocent music (particularly that celestial album of Tang and Song poems that were converted into songs!) and I'm proud of it. Music doesn't need to be experimental to be worthwhile, it shouldn't be "innovative" for the sake of being innovative ... it should just be good =D. Teresa's good. She's solid. I felt comforted knowing that (despite it being a fictional tale, this movie) it was Teresa's music that brought Jun and Qiao together at the end. What an appropriately sweet Chinese ending to a sweet Chinese love story, just as Teresa had so sweetly sang of it so many years ago. =) |
