HK Cinema: Rouge (Stanley Kwan, Hong Kong, 1987)

Note: Showtime is 6PM. Running time is 92 minutes. Tickets are available online here (http://www.sffs.org/exhibition/hong-kong-cinema/rouge)($15 adults, $14 senior/student). Cheaper tickets can be obtained by SF Film Society members or with Cinevoucher.

Hong Kong Cinema (http://www.sffs.org/exhibition/hong-kong-cinema/), the San Francisco Film Society' (http://www.sffs.org/)s annual showcase of new and repertory Hong Kong films, returns for a fifth edition from September 23-25.

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Sensual and atmospheric, Stanley Kwan's 1987 romantic drama stars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung as star-crossed lovers who meet in a brothel. In 1930s Hong Kong, a client known only as Master 12 watches the androgynous Fleur performing Cantonese opera and is immediately smitten. After bowls of opium and subsequent romantic encounters, Master 12 reveals himself as a businessman named Chen, whose family expects him to marry honorably and manage a chain of medical shops. When Fleur suggests they buck tradition and announce their love to his parents, a tragic series of events is set in motion that transcends time and death. For Rouge is also a ghost story, with Fleur returning ("from Hell," she says) to Hong Kong 50 years later and enlisting a newspaper editor and his girlfriend to help find the lover who went back on his word all those years before. Kwan's sublime and haunting film evinces nostalgia for a time when people literally died for love, and carries an additional weight since its two co-stars had their own tragic ends much too young, Mui dying at 40 from cervical cancer and Cheung taking his own life at the age of 46.

Winner of 1988 Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress

Winner of 1988 Golden Horse Awards for Best Actress (Anita Mui)

Director Stanley Kwan is expected to attend the screening

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEY41Gp0KOY