Dir: Ann Hui
Original Story: Eileen Chang
Prod Co: Shaw Brothers
Cast: Cora Miao, Chow Yun-fat, Keung Chung-ping, Chiao Chiao
1984 | Colour | Digital File | Cantonese | Chi & Eng Subtitles | 100min

After her "Vietnamese Trilogy", Ann Hui has adjusted the direction of her creativity and began to adapt literary classics to film. Her first attempt, Love in a Fallen City, was a great challenge. Hui was fiercely faithful in turning Eileen Chang's words into images of light and shadow. After her divorce, Bai (Cora Miao) returns to her parents' home. Poor and powerless, life is made difficult and uncomfortable for her. She meets Fan (Chow Yun-fat), a handsome gentleman just returned from studying in England. They dance together all night long. They later move from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and repeatedly separate and get back together. This pair of worldly lovers grasp at love amidst their offensive and defensive, back-and-forth tug-of-war. The start of the Pacific War turns out to help their destinies.

The film moves large passages of Eileen Chang's text directly onto the screen. It is seen as a forced translation of the original work's sensitive essence. The latter half of the film, how the war scenes are treated, shows off Hui's skills as a director. In a few simple scenes she manages to capture the desolation of a war-torn city. From this, director Ann Hui also realized the difficulty of transforming the shades of imagery and meanings of words to the screen. This provided a good foundation for her film Eighteen Springs (1997), which she again adapted from Eileen Chang's novel 13 years later.

Licensed by Celestial Pictures Limited. All rights reserved.