Sorrows on an Autumn Trip
Last night I saw the jaw-droppingly beautiful, crushing romantic tragedy Rouge, a 1987 Hong Kong movie by Stanley Kwan, which is now one of my favorite movies.
I had never heard of it until I saw a post about it on Twitter. This is why I stay on Twitter: the film buff community, which has introduced me to a vast array of wonderful movies in the past years.
The movie’s first 20 minutes are mesmerizing, starting with sad-eyed singer/actress Anita Mui painting her eyebrows and dyeing her lips with a piece of paper, afterwards singing a beautiful song, clad in a man’s clothes.
The song is called 客途秋恨, ‘Sorrows on an Autumn Trip‘ and it’s from a Cantonese opera. I found beautiful renditions of it on Spotify, by male singers. One is by Lesley Cheung, who is Mui’s co-star in Rouge, the other by a Chinese opera singer.
I couldn’t find the version from the movie, sung by Anita Mui, starting in the video above at the 58th second. I like that version the best. It’s an enchanting song, sad and sweeping and deeply melancholic. I can hardly believe such a beautiful song exists in this here valley of grey misery we call earth.
Rouge is about a courtesan, played by the stunningly beautiful Anita Mui, who passed away in 2003, who commits double suicide with her lover in Hong Kong in the 30’s because he is from an important family who will not allow him to marry a lowly woman who was sold to a brothel when she was 16.
She turns up in Hong Kong in 1987, as beautiful as she was when she died, in a city unrecognisably transformed into a place of loveless concrete and harsh electrical lights, to look for her lover, who didn’t show up in the afterlife, where she has been waiting for him for 50 years.
A pair of journalists, who are lovers themselves, help her look for him, meanwhile examining their own realistic, practical relationship as opposed to the seemingly romantic passion of the courtesan and her lover.
It turns out the romance isn’t as romantic as it seemed, that the passion is stained by selfishness and cowardice, that 30’s Hong Kong, with its plated golds and lacquered woods, beautifully lit in soft striking light, was a harsh place, especially for women, who have it better in 1987. But modern Hong Kong, separated from 30’s Hong Kong by war and revolution, could use some of the romanticism of olden times.
Rouge is gorgeously filmed, the actors are wonderful, the atmosphere deeply romantic, Anita Mui is so captivating. You really have to see this film.
Music, 16.02.2024 @ 12:06