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Li's direction and Jin Yong's script always go hand-in-hand with each other. This time, their collaboration sparks again as the film seamlessly brings three short stories together through three different segments of flashbacks. Yin Zhaozong (Bao Fong) is an amour fou falling in love with a girl much younger than him. Instead, Yu Baicheng (Fu Che) is a playboy trapped by his three girlfriends. The bartender (Chiao Chuang), however, tells them how he and his wife are blessed by true love. The film not only displays Li's sensitivity to narrative structure but also his ability to cast the most suited actors for their respective roles, as such Mao Mei had a chance to demonstrate her dance talent for her debut in this movie.
After falling in love with Han Liren and giving birth to an "illegitimate child", Han Liren abandoned her and married a rich girl and cheated her out of the child. Huang Su then left the country, changed her name to Lin Luping, and became an actress. Sixteen years later, Huang Su was so popular that she was invited to perform in Shanghai. The young actor she worked with, Han Chen, was withdrawn and hated everyone, and everyone discriminated against him because he was an abandoned "illegitimate child". On stage, Han Chen played Lin Luping's son and was very successful. Later Lin Luping finds out that he turns out to be her biological son who was cheated away by Han Liren years ago. At this point, the theater owner Han Liren appears and wishes to get back together with Lin Luping, but is rejected by Lin Luping's mother and son.
Not seen in Hong Kong for many years, A Strange Woman was Li Pingqian's first film at Great Wall Film Studio. Adapted from the play La Tosca by French playwright Victorien Sardou, opera star Xiao Xiangshui (Bai Guang) helps her lover, a revolutionary, to escape from warlords. She finesses with both the head of the secret service (Yan Jun) and her lover's wife, but things do not turn out as planned. Li changed his usual pace to encompass a more conventional and dramatic film plot. Bold and flirtatious in her role, Bai Guang is equally over the top in appearance as Yan Jun. The tension in winning the heroine over drives the plot more than the themes of patriotism and loyalty in love.
Tang Bohu is smitten by the stunning beauty of Qiuxiang, the maid of Grand Tutor Hua, during his visit to a monastery in Suzhou. Stalking the maid, Tang's affections are finally reciprocated with three charming smiles. To approach the fair maid, Tang seeks work in the Grand Tutor residence as a study companion, and his talents win Hua's attention. As a frustrated suitor, he turns to his resourceful friend Zhu Zhishan for help.
Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar Wilde's play on moral values, is adapted for a setting in Shanghai. Young wife Meilin mistakenly believes her husband is having an affair with a social butterfly and decides to leave for a suitor. Her reputation, about to be ruined because of a misplaced fan, is saved by the social butterfly who turns out to be …Unlike typical Chinese scripts on parental love, the understated familial love in the original play is aligned with Li's preference for the undramatic. Motherly love is portrayed indirectly while emotions run strong yet subdued in the film. Poking fun at social culture of the times, this is Li's earliest extant feature film in a modern setting and a showcase of his modernistic and crisp directorial approach.
HK horror film.