Eighteen Springs continues Ann Hui's project of reconstructing film genres. It is based on an Eileen Chang novel, a story of romance and fate set in the Shanghai of the 1930s. Manjing (Wu Chien-lien), a young woman from a once-well-off family, works in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shujun (Leon Lai), the son of wealthy Nanjing merchants. Despite Shujun's reservations about Manjing's family (her sister, Manlu (Anita Mui) works as a nightclub "hostess"), they manage, in stages, to fall in love. The expected progress through engagement to marriage is interrupted, first by Manjing's ambivalence about taking this step, then by Shujun's rejection of her family, and finally by that family's baroquely conceived abuse and enslavement of Shujun. In style, Eighteen Springs is designed to recreate the film world of 1930s and 40s Shanghai. The structure of Eighteen Springs also serves to reshape the melodramatic impulse at its heart. The core of the story is in fact Manjing: the construction of a particular woman's identity, her attempts to maintain control, to shape her destiny, and the extent to which that destiny seems to shape her. But this shape seems to be distorted, the story's strength deflated, the narrative focus muddied, by the way the film elevates Shujun's perspective to a status at least equal to that of Manjing's. One has to wonder to what extent casting decisions, and their attendant commercial calculations, are responsible for this. A decision to exaggerate the prominence of Leon Lai's character, at the expense of Wu Chien-lien's, makes sense in the current troubled commercial state of Hong Kong cinema. But the damage done to the film's narrative coherence is substantial. This focus on Leon Lai should not obscure the achievement of Wu Chien-lien in the film's leading role. Against the expectations imposed by the melodrama genre, she builds a character out of small, lightly sketched, delicately nuanced moments. Each in itself only hints at a full emotional world that lies beneath. But as they accumulate, as Wu's character slowly builds, the parts add up to a rich and very moving whole. If this isn't a career defining performance, yet, it is only because the rest of the film doesn't give Wu Chien-lien as much support as she could use. The rest of the cast is finely chosen. Anita Mui is brilliantly cast as Wu's older sister (both their resemblance and their contrasts are quite striking); Ge You does more than should be possible with the villain's role of Zhu Hongcai. Leon Lai fills space handsomely, but in his scenes with her, he is negative energy: you can almost see how hard Wu is working, how much energy she has to put out to make the scenes work (and they do). A mixed achievement then, whose strengths more than outweigh its weaknesses. A mature, delicately drawn film, that ranks near Ann Hui's best. Eighteen Springs adopts the structure of melodrama, only to subvert it; inflecting it with a specific sense of time passing, one which acknowledges loss, but forestalls nostalgia. A re-constructed melodrama for a post-1997 Hong Kong.
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