BETTER DAYS 少年的你 (2019) dir. Derek Tsang

Autumn Moon (1992), dir. Clara Law

Christopher Doyle, Filming in a Neon World (2014)

available here

tony leung chiu-wai in chungking express, 1994

dir. wong kar-wai

FASCINATED by Anita Mui’s queer presence in HK films, where she has been cast variously as a masculine /cross-dressing woman; a pansexual woman; a woman acting as a man; and a straight-up man. 

Rouge (1987) 

Kawashima Yoshiko (1990)

Fight Back to School III (1993)

Who’s the Man Who’s the Woman (1996)

Emperor Qi-Wu Yuen (2001) 

Five Days of Yam-Pak Movies ～ Bonus: Madam Yun // 芸娘 (dir. Chu Kea/珠璣, 1960) - starring Yam Kim Fai (任劍輝) and Pak Suet Sin (白雪仙)

Click below for more information + some commentary!

Outline & Scene Summary Inspired by Shen Fu/沈復's Qing Dynasty autobiography Six Records of a Floating Life/浮生六記. Madam Yun focuses on Shen Fu (Yam Kim Fai) and his wife Yun (Pak Suet Sin), who live in married bliss with their children at the former’s familial home. However, they fall foul of the machinations of Shen Fu’s younger half-brother, who has designs on the inheritance, and are summarily kicked out. The young family struggle to adjust to their poverty, but their plight is worsened by Yun becoming chronically ill; these desperate straits result in Shen Fu having to leave his family behind in search of paying work. Thankfully, after all his efforts he is able to find a benefactor, and the family is reunited under one roof (which is, sadly, not what happened in real life). In this early scene depicting the calm before storm, Shen Fu is trying to write a poem, but struggles to find the right words to finish off a line. As he is musing, his wife sneaks up and writes in her own suggestion, delighting him with her scholarly wit.

Although the movie as a whole is pretty dour, the first few scenes really stood out to me as a lovely (if inadvertent) depiction of an F/F couple being happily married with children, especially as Pak’s character is not reduced to being a mere mother or housewife, and the focus remains on the love between the pair. It’s also notable that the source material is known for being a rare depiction of a loving marriage in Chinese literature, and the earlier 1954 film adaptation specifically cast two actors who frequently played married couples (namely Cheung Wood-Yau/張活游 and Pak Yin/白燕; see source). The casting of Yam-Pak for this movie indicates that the studio was confident the public would embrace them as not only a romantic pairing, but specifically the ideal of a married couple.

Note: Six Records of a Floating Life is very much worth reading, not only because it's a vividly-drawn portrait of everyday life in 19th-century China (floral arrangements! exam LARPing! complaining about how touristy Hangzhou's West Lake is!), but also because it contains queer elements. There are references to Yun having a relationship with another woman (and asking her husband to take her on as a concubine, lol) and being attracted to other women, none of which are mentioned in this movie.

Links:

My post about Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet Sin being queer icons

Full movie on Youtube

Limbo (2021)

dir. Soi Cheang

esther eng- openly lesbian filmmaker!!

i just found out about esther eng (伍錦霞) the first chinese female filmmaker to make chinese language films in the us and hong kong.

her love for films started from watching cantonese operas!! she made many films in her lifetime, its such a shame most of the films she made are now lost films, except for two films: golden gate girls and murder in new york chinatown.

she was a butch lesbian and there was no controversy around that because in cantonese opera its normal for actors and actresses to crossdress. another fact that made me smile so much is that her grandparents came from toisan (台山)!!! literally punching the air rn bc im from toisan, i speak cantonese and im also a lesbian i am literally so happy.

i also loved how people called her by the nickname "霞哥" ("ha brother" in english)

i literally cannot express how much finding out about esther eng made my day

also if your interested this is the article i read

Jackie Chan

Michelle Yeoh

1992’s “Police Story III”

Fallen Angels (1995)

Soundtrack

Forget Him - Shirley Kwan

The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊, 2022)

The Sparring Partner (正義迴廊, 2022) #TheSparringPartner #Crime #Drama #Thriller #HKFilm #AsianCinema #Film #Movie #Review

The Sparring Partner (2022) Director: Cheuk Tin Ho Cast: Alan Yeung, Pui Tung Mak, Louisa So, Michael Chow, Jan Lamb, Gloria Yip Based on a shocking case in real life, a young man partners with his friend to murder and dismember his parents. Pleading not guilty to the crime, defense attorneys face each other as nine jurors grapple with the truth. – IMDB Based on the 2013 Tai Kok Tsui double…

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BETTER DAYS  少年的你 (2019) dir. Derek Tsang

Autumn Moon (1992), dir. Clara Law

Christopher Doyle, Filming in the Neon World (2014)

(available here)

entering my bbc sherlock mind palace to remember what tone 桃 is pronounced with. i walk down a silent hall impassively presided over by fifty-foot marble statues of the duolingo characters. i come to the end of the hall and sit in the theatre from cinema paradiso (1988); the projector whirs to life behind me, and the screen glows with a scene from a chinese movie where peaches are incredibly important. i lean forward and listen intently. tony leung speaks. the movie is in fucking CANTONESE this doesn’t help me AT ALL. i throw my chair at the screen and exit the mind palace to look it up in the dictionary

On this date in 2001, at the 73rd Academy Awards, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000) was named Best Foreign Film.

The four main actors all spoke Mandarin, but with different accents. Chow Yun-Fat had a Cantonese accent, Michelle Yeoh had a Malaysian/English accent, Ziyi Zhang had a Beijing accent, and Chang Chen had a Taiwanese accent. Because of the difficulty some Chinese-speaking markets had with the voices, some markets actually had a dubbed version (into standard Mandarin) of the soundtrack. According to Yun-Fat, he had to do twenty-eight takes of his first scene on the first day of shooting, because he had such difficulty speaking Mandarin. When asked in an interview with Time Magazine how he felt about his Mandarin pronunciation, he replied, "It's awful."

As Yeoh did not speak Mandarin, the script was presented to her phonetically with help from Mandarin-speaking crew members. In fact, her Malaysian accent can be heard throughout.

While Zhang's character is obviously highly trained and skillful in martial arts, the actress herself never had any official martial arts training at all. Instead, she used her dance techniques to learn her moves in these scenes as if they were a dance rather than a fight (which, in terms of creating and filming them, is actually not that far from the truth).

Taiwanese-born Hong Kong actress Shu Qi was originally cast in Zhang's role of Jiaolong Yu and worked on the film for several weeks, until her agent pulled her from the movie to do a Pepsi commercial in Japan. She has since changed agents. The first draft of the screenplay said, "You will note in the script that none of the fight scenes are described, and I will just inform you now that they will be the greatest fight scenes ever in the history of cinema, period." (IMDb)

[Cinema Shorthand Society]