I didn't plan to write a comment. Since it was released in 1991, and no one has left a single comment, so I am compelled to write one now.
This is supposed to be a story about people living in Shanghai. However, the director is from hongkong, the main actors are picked from hongkong and Taiwan. I don't know why this director likes to direct movies about mainland China, I have also seen her other mainland China movie called "The Postmodern Life of My Aunt". It is like a south korean director trying to direct a movie about north Korea, although they are similar, but there are still differences. For example, mainland China uses simplified Chinese, however, in the movie, the grandson's calligraphy was in traditional Chinese.
Even though the movie that I watched was directly from a DVD, the picture quality is really bad. And somehow, the Chinese language printed on screen don't match with the words they actually spoke. And it seems that in the original movie, they speak some Shanghai dialect. In the DVD, everyone's voice was dubbed. And the grandson's voice is dubbed by a female.
The first 30 minutes was boring to watch. The last hour was OK. Even though those hongkong, Taiwan actors are not bad. It just doesn't have the authenticity of real people living in Shanghai. It is probably because of that, they were able to show this movie outside mainland China, and make some money.
