This film is a post-Cultural-Revolution (1966-76) story. Twenty years later, the shadow of the destructive decade still lingers over the lives of people with wounded feelings and haunted memories.
The Kang Family was once a "bourgeois" family, owning a garden house built during the former French Concession and living a happy life till catastrophe fell upon them in the late 1960s. Enforced by the red guard during the Cultural Revolution, the house has long been shared by several other families. The four adult children of the family are now scattered and residing in three places: Shanghai, Inner Mongolia and San Francisco. When the mother is suddenly hospitalized, all the children--each for their own reasons--return to her. The family reunion, however, is anything but a happy event: the four siblings are even unable to have one peaceful dinner together, and the mother herself has serious matters to settle with everyone of them.
For many Chinese people, the damages of the Cultural Revolution is as severe as those caused by World War II: it lasted for ten years, caused thousands of families to lose loved ones-- certainly not in glorious or graceful ways. Shanghai Story reflects upon the Revolution not by representing the spectacular street chaos and denouncement meeting-- as done in films like Farewell, My Concubine-- but by demonstrating how love, trust and communication become so difficult for family members under the shadow of the Revolution. While other films about the Cultural Revolution often involve group memory, and thus attempt to recover details of the historical event, Shanghai Story focuses on a family shattered after the father was beaten to death for no crime at all. The question that the film raises is both subversive and poignant: a historical disaster may come to an end, but can people forgive each other and move on in their rest lives?
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