Love in a Fallen City
(Qing cheng zhi lian)

Ann Hui keeps a relationship of kinship, if not intimacy, with the work of writer Eileen Chang, one of whose works she here brings to the screen for the first time. It is in the attention to detail, in seeking the right emotion and pictorial treatment that the filmmaker comes as close as possible to a past, but pivotal era of Hong Kong’s history (1941) and to characters who are all prisoners of their social role. Here, women do not exist in the gaze of others, women included, except through a male filter. Affairs without love, smooth and troubled talk, the cacophony of cultures and values; the high-society and fanciful atmosphere of Love in a Fallen City acts like a trap. JB