Stanley Kwan’s Rouge begins as a delicate romantic drama set in the dwindling glory days of Hong Kong’s teahouses. Amid lavish parlors populated by wealthy men and fawning courtesans, Chen Chen-pang (Leslie Cheung), meets a twentysomething courtesan, Fleur (Anita Mui), and the two build an easy rapport across a series of teasing games of mutual flattery rooted in centuries-old traditions of courtship.
Through it all, cinematographer Bill Wong’s camera seemingly dances after Chen and Fleur as they play their game of cat and mouse, delighting in the surroundings and the love that blossoms between them. So enchanting is this opening that it becomes all the more jarring when the film jumps to 1987 Hong Kong to find Fleur, still unaged and wearing a florid cheongsam, standing in a newspaper office inquiring about placing a classified ad in order to locate Chen. In short order, it’s revealed that we’re watching the ghost of the courtesan, who, more than 50 years after she and Chen committed suicide by opium overdose, is seeking to reunite with his spirit.
This revelation ignites a time-hopping romance in which the doomed relationship between a high-society, wealthy heir and a lowly, socially undesirable courtesan is at once venerated and criticized. Fleur and Chen’s story contrasts with that of Yuen (Alex Man), the reporter who first encounters Fleur’s ghost at his office, and his girlfriend, fellow journalist Chor (Emily Chu). After the two get used to the shock of being around a dead woman, Yuan and Chor slowly become infatuated with the details that Fleur shares about her relationship with Chen.
As Fleur relates her story of romance (glimpsed in various flashbacks), the depths of her and Chen’s love prompts Yuen and Chor to re-evaluate their own feelings for one another. In one scene, each asks if the other would die for them, and both are at once relieved and vaguely hurt that the other says no. In such moments, we understand how the constricting rules of conduct that determine specific behavior among the older society’s members can result in explosive and desperate love affairs, and how more relaxed modern customs around dating can make couples like Yuan and Chor feel so comfortable that they’re effectively cut off from the most intense parts of themselves. Rouge is as much an examination of the pros and cons of each approach to love as the tale of Fleur searching for her lover’s spirit.
Rouge flows back and forth between a colorful and ornate past and a drab, steely present. Tellingly, a bridge of sorts between these eras lies in Chen’s family home, where Fleur is summoned by his mother (Tam Sin-hung), who expresses her disapproval of her son’s choice of a partner. The parlor where the woman meets Fleur is windowless and dark, lit only by the faintly visible daylight pouring in from an adjacent room, and the spartan decoration of the setting suggests that the mother purposefully met her would-be daughter-in-law in the least welcoming spot of her house. The moment Fleur enters the room, she knows where the conversation will head, and she deflates into the hollowed figure we see in the present.
The darker hues and dimmer lighting scheme of the present-day scenes are befitting of this story of alienation. Fleur regularly floats into the frame in total silence, her face so underlit that she looks gray and translucent behind the living characters. Mui was an electrifying pop star and an action film staple, but here she delivers an eerily still performance in the present-day scenes, speaking with deadpan flatness and moving with deliberate slowness. Even when Fleur laughs warmly from a cherished memory, her eyes remain cold and expressionless. Her distanced quality in the present contrasts with her demonstrative passion in the past, which is matched by Cheung’s sensual, delicate performance as Chen, who at times has the same coquettish, graceful movements as the courtesans who gawk at him.
With its use of overlapping time, its sumptuous and humid colors, and occasional futzing with frame rates to create hyperreal motion, Rouge anticipates the work of Wong Kar-wai. Yet the film’s denouement in some respects hits harder than Wong’s more poetic stories of heartbreak, in part because of the heavier emphasis on social commentary, as one can see class and gender roles ultimately assert control over even those who defy them. Rouge is also a commentary on Hong Kong’s ever-changing nature as it neared the 1997 handoff from the U.K. to China, positioning Fleur as displaced in more ways than one as a relic of a time unrecognizable to those living a mere half-century later. Kwan’s most direct statement on this point naturally involves cinema. At one point, Fleur asks Yuan about a movie theater she used to frequent, and we see a hazy mental picture of her memory of the palatial building, only for Yuan to explain that it’s now a store as the image cuts sharply to the empty glow of a 7-11.
Image/Sound
Criterion’s Blu-ray captures the full range of Rouge’s dual narrative. The bright colors of the 1930s scenes are radiant and warm, while the darker, drabber contemporary scenes show consistent stability in much lower light conditions. Unrestored clips of the film in some of the bonus features testify to just how detail-rich this transfer is; the soft, faded look that’s common to essential but little seen films of Hong Kong cinema is a ghost that’s nowhere to be seen here. The sound comes in both the original mono and a 5.1 surround remix, and while both presentations are crisp, the latter boasts a greater variance of ambiance, be it from the musical score and regular intrusion of Chinese opera or the din of modern urban life.
Extras
The disc comes with two 1997 films by Stanley Kwan: the essayistic Still Love You After All These and the documentary Yang ± Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema. Each explores Hong Kong’s social and cinematic history while also considering both the filmmaker’s sexuality and the general depiction of sexual identity in Chinese cinema. Still Love You After All These mixes clips from Kwan’s filmography with archival footage of Hong Kong to craft a personalized, subjective city symphony. Kwan’s narration constantly likens his sexual identity to Hong Kong’s own uncertain sense of self, and in many respects the short can be seen as the preemptive Hong Kong answer to the Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City. Yang ± Yin is a more objective account of sexuality in Chinese cinema with observations of gender roles and expressions of intimacy that have always existed in Chinese art and could be read as queer. A new interview with Kwan details his entire career, while a thorough booklet essay by critic Dennis Lim unpacks the aesthetic and thematic richness of the film’s ghost story.
Overall
Criterion offers a sumptuous release of Stanley Kwan’s dense and masterful Rouge, and bolsters it with two additional, fascinating films as bonuses.
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