The Postmodern Life of My Aunt
(Yi ma de hou xian dai sheng huo)

Mrs Ye Rutang, at sixty, is a little bit old-fashioned and would like to feel at home in Shanghai, where the changing city’s chaos perturbs her routine existence. If the shock of traditional values with the accelerating modernisation of society has inspired many Chinese films over the past twenty years, here again the tone is surprising, slipping between time and space, leaving Shanghai for the North-East and the city of Anshan (where Ann Hui was born), from the first part’s tragi-comedy to a dark melancholy. Between the absurdness of the present and a past that is irrevocably erased, the contrasts reveal true emotional wounds. JB