Like many young people of the 1920s, Kong and Yan are infected with the "happily ever after" syndrome waiting for their perfect match. Unlike other love stories, this couple journeys through murder, ghostly spirits and true sacrifice all in the name of love.
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Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Inspired, ingenious, pure and sincere, there're very few films out there like this and it's really a shame. Tsui Hark strings us along for what seems like a typical rom-com slapstick at the beginning before abruptly expelling us into several other dimensions of cinema at the drop of a hat, and the rest of the film becomes an exercise in execution, almost more a showing of a magician's bag of tricks rather than a film outlined by a tight narrative, but given the tricks at play I don't think many would complain. In doing so it builds upon itself, never losing sight of its rom-com origins but layering over it with inventive techniques that push the two lovers-to-be closer together…
Oh just your typical mashup of Back to the Future, Ghost, Cantonese Opera, Looney Tunes and vomit jokes. The least well-known of Tsui Hark's four films from 1995 but it might be the best. The Blade is a dark as hell ultra-violent wuxia film, The Chinese Feast a farce about food and community, and this one an effects-driven, period romantic comedy. (I haven't seen the fourth, The Lovers, which like this one also stars Charlie Yeung and Nicky Wu, yet). What a year.
A variation on the multiple-couple format of his own Shanghai Blues and Peking Opera Blues, except the couples are doppelgangers of the central figures as what begins as a conventional romantic comedy (anti-romantic opening where the protagonists…
fleet-footed front-to-back bonkers romantic comedy with a time travel twist, where two rivals-turned-lovers (the man being a ghost, having been murdered by gangsters) join forces to not only save the life of the man but also to ensure their own love. it all escalates into something that's structurally clever (the knotty plotting and recontextualization of the first half into the second, down to specific shots) and visually imaginative (even with, or maybe directly because of, its lo-fi special effects, such as cgi'd stretched arms, or a warpy psychedelic time portal and limbo-realm of the dead, or our two heroes fused at the back by an accidental temporal glitch). also has plenty of digressive gags to go around, the projectile vomiting…
Tsui’s ghost story/time travel/romantic comedy/nostalgia romp is so inventive in a scene by scene basis that the parts barely cohere in the middle of the frantic pace barely matters. It is his work at its experimental best and full of lovely privileged moments.
A staggering confluence of visual and sonic experimentation in a meta-cinematic universe, one that calls for an immanent conception of corporeal and incorporeal existence. Body and spirit are broken down and reconstituted before our eyes, deeply and eagerly attuned to the potentialities and manifold meanings of human connection. All of this is contained within a narrative framework where spatiotemporal boundaries and aesthetic dimensions routinely collide and ultimately coalesce with each other. The result is an exuberant kind of syncretic theatricality that celebrates love in all its myriad forms. My kind of Asian Baby Girl/Fuccboi cinema 🥰
tsui hark's strange experimentation with cgi might have come to its fruition in this magical film. while american cgi is typically praised it reaches some semblance of verisimilitude (e.g. jurassic park), tsui's cgi revels in artificiality in order to create striking fantastical images. in this respect one could compare tsui's approach to, say, the matte paintings in hitchcock's marnie, but that would be somewhat inaccurate because cgi for tsui, certainly in this film, is a matter of elevating emotion rather than hitchcock's distanciation. in other words, tsui hark is firmly self-aware of cgi's inherent spectacle and seems to embrace it with sincerity whether for humorous purposes (kong's facial contortions and hovering punctuation) or the stuff of nightmares (the lampost purgatory littered with hazy obelisks and scattered anatomy).
she don't even know my name but she look me in the eyes like she know my pain
"Our future will be determined by today."
There is a lot going on in Tsui Hark's Love in the Time of Twilight. At its most basic level, it's a romantic comedy about an unlikely couple that falls in love in spite of their initial animosity, but it's also kind of a meta romance because it portrays popular perceptions of love and romantic fantasy structures and tackles love in a conceptual way. But that's not even what's so wild about it: it also involves ghosts and time travel and a kind of dreamlike spirit realm where both ghosts and people can get trapped if they're not careful.
What most interests me about the film is the way it critically engages with…
needed to watch this again before watching licorice pizza tomorrow lol
"love takes time, just like cooking vegetables."
what starts out as a story of people trying to find their one true love with a comedic angle turns into a fantastical journey of unexpected proportions: a torrent of the surreal, bizarre and supernatural; an eclectic web of influences and tropes woven together in an intricate, unapologetically sincere and heartfelt fashion. wholly fascinating, incredibly fun, sweet, engrossing - unparalleled.
// and this is where i wanna stop already. i almost feel like i gave away too much. you know when people tell you a film is a 'wild ride'? this is one of the most unique and criminally underseen ones deserving of the title.
