Comrades—Almost a Love Story is a movie I am embarrassed to admit I had not seen until a couple of days ago. I’ve always suspected that Peter Chan’s movies are a bit heavy on the schlock factor, and to a certain extent, that’s true of this film, but in a relatively unoffensive way.
I can’t and won’t write a full-blown review or criticism of the movie here, but will jsut offer some desultory notes.
Leon Lai’s performance: cloying at times, but he grows on you. In the beginning you think: there’s no way someone that “polished” looking could ever be some bumpkin from the mainland, much less Tianjin. Of course, Lai’s roots are in Beijing, so I guess that’s not really the issue. It’s just that he’s too fresh-faced. NO matter how hard he tries he looks like he’s in some skin-care product commercial.
Maggie Cheung: well, she was ok for the most part, but there were one or two scenes where she was absolutely brilliant: one is after they have gone to bed together (after he’s married his girlfriend). The inevitable conversation occurs: what are we going to do about this? He says, without flinching, that he will return to his life, to his wife and his home. And she says, then what about me. The way that scene is shot—they are in bed—adds to the effect. She is lit so that you mostly just see her face, half in light and half-hidden in shadow. In this scene she nails the pathos of the other woman in a way that few other actresses have or will.
The Teresa Teng (邓丽君) trope that runs through the movie does more than just provide a soundtrack for the movie: there is a sense in which her music, which bridged the divide between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland in a way that politics never could, serves as a fitting metaphor. The popularity of her music in the pop-music starved China of the 1980s is a collective cultural memory and emotional anchor for the two mainland immigrants. Everyone in Taiwan and Hong Kong had probably heard her music much earlier and were already “over it.” On the other hand, Teng’s music “originated” in Taiwan, where she was from—and so their appropriation of this music represents the mainlanders’ entry into the world of Chinese-language pop music. At present, the Chinese pop culture industry knows no boundaries—sure there are still (political) bans on certain performers (mainlanders in Taiwan, blacklisted musicians on either side, etc)—but for the most part, everyone is in on the conversation, no one is left behind. There is no time lag—the music is released simultaneously as is the information, thanks to the internet. The performers always have mainland tours, not as an afterthought but as their main source of income.
Teng’s death in the movie comes just as the dreams of the two main characters are on the verge of collapse: Li Qiao’s mob-boss husband gets killed in a shooting in New York City, and she is about to be deported. Li Xiaojun has divorced and moved to New York City to work as a cook, and doesn’t have much of a social or emotional life. It is at this moment that they finally meet again, and the fairy tale seems to come to a close. The carriage has become a pumpkin, or has it. Will life keep surprising you with miracles when you least suspect it?
