PEKING OPERA BLUES (1986)
Directed by: Tsui Hark
Written by: Raymond To
Action Choreography by: Ching Siu-tung
Starring: Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh, Cherie Chung, Mark Cheng, Cheung Kwok-keung, Kenneth Tsang, Wu Ma, Paul Chun Pui, Lee Hoi-sang
The finest moment in the careers of Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung, Sally Yeh and Tsui Hark, Peking Opera Blues may also be the finest moment for cinema, period. Representing the best of everything that movies can be, POB is one hundred years of filmmaking captured in 105 minutes of celluloid. A women's movie, a comedy, a serial cliffhanger, a romance, a musical, and a tender whiff of nostalgia as the present forever turns into the past, it fulfills all the promises the movies ever made to you. It's a kiss to make it better for all the times you've bought a ticket in good faith and left the theater with the taste of ashes in your mouth.
At the time it was made, men ruled the box office, but Tsui had been turned on to women by Sylvia Chang when he made Shanghai Blues. “In that movie you’ve got women playing male roles,” Tsui said in a later interview. “Sylvia encouraged me to explore what female psyches could bring to a male persona. She kept telling me that females were richer subjects, more complex than guys, and at first I questioned that. By stretching the dimensions of the gender of the characters in that movie, I realized she was right.”
Tsui had produced A Better Tomorrow with John Woo, and even then he wanted that film’s three male leads to be played by women (with Michelle Yeoh in the Chow Yun-fat role), but finally Peking Opera Blues came along and gave him a chance to have his all female trio in the lead. Of course, there’s another explanation for the movie’s roots: Tsui Hark rolled all the movies he ever saw into a giant joint, hunched over in the corner away from the other kids, huffed and puffed, and then, eyes streaming, hair crazed, heart pounding double time, high on the fumes of the movies he loved he directed the most sustained burst of cinematic inspiration ever put on film.
Time: early 1913. The cruel morning after for millions of Chinese. The Qing Dynasty had been overthrown in 1912, and Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist party was about to turn China into a democratic republic when one of his supporters, the immensely powerful General Yuan, forced Sun Yat-sen to hand over control of the country at gunpoint. Sun Yat-sen did so in order to preserve harmony, and General Yuan instantly became a despot, revising the Constitution at will and holding onto power with generous applications of force. In many ways it was even worse than the benign mismanagement of the deposed Qing Emperor, and Sun Yat-sen fled for his life.
Negotiating a huge loan with the Europeans on behalf of General Yuan is General Cao, newly installed in Peking (now Beijing). Yuan hopes this loan will float the pirate government but, unbeknownst to anyone, General Cao's daughter, Tsao Wan (Brigitte Lin), is a secret revolutionary assigned to stop the loan from going through. Having to oppose her own father, and most of the Chinese government, Tsao Wan finds motley assistance from Pat Neil (Sally Yeh) the daughter of an opera company owner who dreams of the stage, even though women are barred from performing; and Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung) a gold-crazy courtesan. These three women are thrown together by the chaos of history and the movie tracks the evolution of their relationship, from the utilitarian using of one another to genuine friendship.
With action choreography by Ching Siu-tung, Peking Opera Blues is not the stiff costume drama its plot description tags it as. Incredibly fluid, this is a movie about longing, duty, slapstick, desire, carny folk, the opera, revolution, farce, gunfights, and the eternal nostalgic present that is Chinese history. Hilarious and death-defying, there's not a shot wrong in this entire movie, with a miniseries worth of plot and incident packed into its streamlined shell.
Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh and Cherie Chung were three of the brightest and best movie stars of the 80's and the camera worships them accordingly. Brigitte Lin was one of Taiwan's best actresses, just crossing over to Hong Kong. Sally Yeh was one of the colony's most popular pop stars, and Mark Cheng (playing Ling Pak-hoi, the dashing revolutionary) was a bright, young leading man (who would later marry martial arts bruiser, Yukari Oshima). Originally written as a play to be performed at the local YWCA by Hong Kong uber-playwright, Raymond To, the movie is one of the most popular and well-respected to come out of Hong Kong, an eternal presence on critical, and personal, top ten lists. Critics have said of Peking Opera Blues that "Tsui Hark out-Spielbergs Spielberg," which doesn't really do Tsui Hark justice. By the time this movie is over you expect the entire planet to turn out the lights and call it a day.