The Eternal Love

Dir/Scr: Zhu Shilin
Orig Story: Puxian opera After the Reunion
Prod Co: Great Wall
Cast: Hsia Moon, Fu Che, Kung Chiu-hsia, Bow Fong, Shi Lei
1960 | Colour | DCP | Mandarin | Chi & Eng Subtitles | 93min

Winning the top spot at national exam, the scholar Shi returns triumphant to his hometown to marry Liu, a lady from a respectable family, while his widowed mother is also bestowed with honours and a chastity arch. Tragedy strikes when the mother’s affair with her cousin is exposed, and she kills herself out of shame. Liu confesses to wrongdoing to protect the family, and Shi accidentally kills his father… The Eternal Love is likely director Zhu Shilin’s darkest work, exposing the devastating effects of feudalistic social orders. Virtually every character in the film meets a tragic fate, from the moral failures of the older generation to the younger generation’s inability to escape the outdated but unforgiving morality.
 
The Reform of traditional Chinese opera was launched in the mid-1950s, infusing progressive ideas into the medium. After watching the famed Puxian opera After the Reunion (also adapted to film by the Changchun Film Studio in the same year), actress Hsia Moon recommended it to Zhu, an opera aficionado. This sowed the seeds for Zhu’s late-career penchant for adapting operatic masterworks, one of them The Eternal Love. With strong contrasts developing from great joy to sombre tragedy, the story progresses relentlessly, revealing the rigidities and hypocrisies of archaic traditional ethics. Zhu’s film is also sympathetic—admiring, even—of Liu, the virtuous, self-sacrificing wife dedicated to preserving certain aspects of traditional family values.

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