There is something fishy about A Time to Remember (紅色戀人), directed by Yip Yian. Genre-wise this film should fall under the heading of "films set in the Nationalist era" (民戲). Not that this nostalgic genre is always replete of seedy characters who ought to be psychoanalyzed and clinically sequestered. Of course there are many critically acclaimed classics out there such as Shanghai Grand (上海灘), The Last Manchurian Princess (川島芳子), Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬), The Soong Sisters (宋家皇朝), The Christ of Nanking (南京的基督) and Intimates (自梳). But this movie is, in my humble opinion, an excessively meek attempt to recapture whatever overclouding times it tries to remember.

            It’s based on a memoir by Robert Payne, a loutish American doctor who loitered around Shanghai in the 1930’s. Need I say that he fell hopelessly in love with a communist agent? Naturally, his memoir, much like Helen Snow’s unenlightened autobiography, is grossly overcoloured by his personal misconception of China, which in the movie culminates to a five-minute public pageantry of red flags in proud display, with starry-eyed, merry-hearted red soldiers waltzing down the boulevards. There he ejaculates his personal philosophy in a pretentious voice-over about the Awakening of the People, while discreetly omitting any allusion that the Ideal points to a disastrous path thereafter. In fact, if it were not played by none other than Leslie Cheung himself, I would have promptly filed this movie under the drawer of officious propaganda. Leslie Cheung plays a Maoist revolutionary who, curiously like Mao Zedong himself, has studied literature in France and sacrificed a wife in his political endeavours. But this moribund role rather mocks bitterly his past break-through characters such as the gay opera singer in Farewell My Concubine, the melancholic swordsman in Ashes of Time (東邪西毒), and the homosexual expatriate in Happy Together (春光乍洩). Overall, this looks to me a desperate attempt to rebound to stardom. I just didn't know he has fallen out of favour so fast that he is no longer in the position to choose scripts with foreseeable potential. If you have not seen this movie - skip it by all means.

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