Stanley Kwan’s Rouge and the end of history

REAL THINGS ARE ALWAYS UGLY. Murmured by a personality in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987), these phrases double as a commentary on the director’s broader filmography, marked by stressed expeditions throughout the gossamer boundary between fiction and actuality. Content material at occasions to dwell inside comforting, cathartic artifices, such because the thundering melodrama of Lan Yu (2001), at others Kwan turns a extra skeptical eye on the conventions of style, as in his snaking metafiction Heart Stage (1991). This conflicted perspective towards the templates prescribed by industrial filmmaking was attribute of the New Wave that rippled via Hong Kong’s film business beginning within the early Eighties, one which included Wong Kar-wai and, in its earlier part, Ann Hui and Tsui Hark. Exemplary of this motion, Rouge finds Kwan borrowing the construction of a ghost story to discover how the pressures of modernity penetrate and reshape even the deepest areas of 1’s innermost needs. 

Fleur (Anita Mui), a courtesan, falls for a rich inheritor named Chen-bong (Leslie Cheung) amid the opium-soaked luxurious of the Nineteen Thirties. Thwarted by his disapproving mother and father, the lovers plan to kill themselves collectively and reunite within the afterlife. Throughout this fever dream, an abrupt minimize to the glittering Hong Kong skyline hits like a splash of chilly water, crashing via the voluptuous exuberance of the previous to disclose an austere, sepulchral current. The digital camera swivels right here to a unique couple, Yuan and Chu (Alex Man and Irene Wan), a pair of eminently cheap journalists who couldn’t be farther faraway from the self-destructive Fleur and Chen-bong. One evening, Fleur seems beneath the cruel fluorescence of the newsroom to put an advert for a lacking particular person. Chen-bong has stood her up in hell, and fifty years after her suicide, she’s returned to the mortal realm to search out him.

Fleur’s ghostly situation is peculiar, rendered with a specificity that remembers the multifarious number of spirits enumerated in Chinese language folklore. Her theatrical make-up and iridescent cheongsam flag her as ontologically out of joint along with her environment, like a cardboard cutout positioned earlier than a scenic panorama. The fabric world tries to spit her out at each flip. She will be able to’t be uncovered to sunlight, and when she tries to take a chunk from an apple, a fount of blood spurts alarmingly from her mouth. However neither is she wholly spectral, gifted with the power to stroll via partitions. The mechanics of her embodiment are extra mysterious; typically in a position to traverse a room with superhuman pace, at different occasions she’s burdened by the load and textures of corporeality (at one level, Chu caresses Fleur’s cheongsam, praising the material’s high quality.) Moderately than hovering past the bodily universe, she appears to nestle tentatively inside it, her ghostliness an unstable alloy of previous and current.

On this method, Fleur has a lot in frequent with Hong Kong as it’s portrayed by Kwan, who eschews the type of nostalgic longing acquainted from the movies of Wong Kar-wai for one thing extra unique. Within the fifty years since Fleur’s loss of life, the city-state has undergone a drastic transformation (for starters, the brothel the place she labored has been changed by an elementary college). However Kwan’s imaginative and prescient of a modernizing Hong Kong is marked much less by a clear wiping away of what got here earlier than than by the cussed, lingering pockets of a recalcitrant antiquity. In a thrift store, Yuan and Chu discover a newspaper that carries Fleur’s 1934 obituary. The shopkeeper factors out that these tabloids, as soon as nugatory, now benefit from the standing of artifacts from a bygone period. The pace of progress ends in a relentless biking of Hong Kong’s bodily affordances, whereby they merely “don’t stand lengthy sufficient to accumulate the sensation of permanence that in flip offers option to nostalgia earlier than they too are demolished,” because the cultural critic Rey Chow has written. What Yuan and Chu uncover isn’t just a clue that unlocks the thriller of Chen-bong’s whereabouts, but additionally a mongrel temporality deformed by capitalism, during which the current has arrived earlier than the remnants of the previous have even decomposed.

And as they proceed deeper into the town, it turns into clear that the amphetamine tempo of historic change has remodeled not solely the concrete environs of Hong Kong, however the inside terrain of its denizens as properly. What directly troubles and tantalizes the fashionable couple is the reckless depth of Fleur and Chen-bong’s ardor; their makes an attempt to grasp it brush up towards a beguiling otherness that defeats their comprehension. They ask one another, “Would you commit suicide for me? Would we be that romantic?” No. The defoliated and cautious affections of contemporary love inevitably pale towards Fleur’s all-consuming want. (Kwan’s emotional topology of neoliberalism contrasts with that of his up to date Johnnie To, whose spectacular two-part rom-com Don’t Go Breaking My Coronary heart envisions the hypercapitalist fantasia of Hong Kong’s monetary sector as an area for unleashing masculine virility in cartoonishly titanic proportions.) At one level, mendacity in mattress, Yuan and Chu turn into so aroused simply by discussing Fleur’s plight, vicariously imagining what they might have achieved in her place, that they find yourself having intercourse—the primary time we’ve seen this couple evince something resembling bodily attraction. For Kwan, the lurid dramas of historical past operate as stimulants for modernity’s neutered passions.

Fleur finally finds and confronts Chen-bong, who seems to have survived the suicide try, occurring to squander his household’s fortune. The trio finds him straggling alongside as an additional on the set of a wuxia film. That he would find yourself within the movie business, of all locations, suggests an effort to recapture the Technicolor vibrancy of a vanished period, the glories of cinema compensating for a boring and disappointing current on the finish of historical past. Kwan sharpens this self-reflexive critique additional by aiming it squarely on the viewer of his personal movie. As Fleur approaches Chen-bong, Kwan intermittently cuts away to reverse photographs of Yuan and Chu breathlessly watching the drama earlier than them unfold—framing these characters, in a Hitchcockian gambit straight out of Rear Window, as moviegoers in entrance of a display screen. If we’ve already seen the consummatory energy that this sort of voyeurism exerts over the younger couple, Kwan now turns the lens round on us: inviting us to think about the query, instantly and unnervingly private, of how cinema salves the ugliness of actual issues.

— Alex Kong

Rouge was rereleased by the Criterion Assortment on June 21.