Rouge

He promised to go with her, but she found no him. Fifty years had passed. She still kept searching. Perhaps no way did her world go complete without him. But did he keep his promise ??? That's the story.

Hongkong film industry reached the peak in late 80s, and this movie is one of the best produced that time. In it we can find very good actors and director, very beautiful cinematography, and a thoughtful story of course.

Silent and slow but not boring. A must see.

Unhappy together. An exquisite, enduringly resonant elegy for both lost love and vanishing history, Rouge is made all the more surreal thanks to its transcendently melancholy mood that's as illusory as time itself. One that feels all the more resonant and devastating due to real life coming to echo the film, with this already sombre love story made all the more tragic by the untimely deaths of its two leads. It's a subtle exploration of the differences between its periods, achieved through simple juxtaposition, particularly in terms of contrasting societal attitudes toward love and marriage. Director Stanley Kwan renders the two time periods in radically different ways, the thirties in florid images and modern times in muted tones; the lurid dramas of history functioning as stimulants for neutered passions of what was modern society, a journey to a time seemingly glamorous, yet everything always has a spell that can never be broken. But it's the lead performers that simply dominate and overshadow the plot from beginning to end. Cheung brings an enormous sensitivity and vulnerability to his role. He is impulsive and romantic, but also weak-minded and cowardly. Mui is simply radiant as Fleur. She has such a careful and precise control over her presence and presentation throughout the film. Above all, she gives her character a tremendous dignity. Does love really last forever? Infused with both a sense of nostalgia and, ultimately, an interrogation of that nostalgia, by Rouge's end, the sadness over the loss of the past seems to fade away. Ending on a forward-looking basis: the past has brought pain and regret, and the future is free of it, inviting its audience, in the end, things are probably going to be better in the years to come than the ones that have passed.

This is a film which is enthralling and gripping from beginning to end. It centers around two lovers from the "wrong sides of the tracks." Leslie Cheung is in love with a high class whore played exquisetely by Anita Mui (as Fleur - or "Flower" in English). Since society was against them being together, Anita poisoned them both but only she died. Her ghost spends the rest of the film (involved with a touching and oftimes comedic sidestory about a reporter and his girlfriend) in search of him. It is beautifully shot throughout. It really reminds one of the "one who got away" so to speak. A definite recommendation.

"...like a dreamy moon, or a flower just out of reach..."

Stanley Kwan serves up a feast for the eyes in Rouge, with its gorgeous colors, lights, and the radiant Anita Mui. The connection between her and Leslie Cheung is electric from the very beginning when she sings to him. She plays a woman in 1930's Hong Kong who had been sold into prostitution as a teenager, and he's a customer of hers from a well-to-do-family. When they start getting serious, however, his mother politely objects.

I won't spoil it, but how the film transitions unexpectedly to the present, with a ghostly haunting, and then to melancholy is both dreamy and touching. Anita Mui is dazzling throughout, and the cute newspaper couple, played by Emily Chu and Alex Man, provide a nice modern relationship parallel. Aside from the feelings of romance and heartache the film stirs up, there are elements of sentimentality from things simply changing with time, like the city itself. The ending goes for the emotional jugular too, and succeeds.

One of those slow, lugubrious films that nevertheless holds your interest if you are intrigued by the stars. And in this case the stars are two all-time greats of Hong Kong cinema, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui. Cheung's complex performance as Mui's lover, simultaneously devoted and ambivalent, is nuanced by the knowledge of his real-life homosexuality. Throughout the film, the camera returns to focus on Mui's face; she holds one's interest through her ability to convey her inner thoughts through an amazing range of facial expressions.

This complicated love story is now made more poignant by the real life fact that both actors died young, in 2003 - Cheung by suicide and Mui by cancer. Recommended for romantics, film buffs, and devotees of Cheung and Mui.