Cheap Rouge (DVD) (Leslie Cheung) (Stanley Kwan) Price

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Customer Reviews of Rouge

Fleur becomes a ghost, doomed to search for her lost lover who has not followed up in hell. Enlisting the aid of a newspaper editor and his girlfriend, she publishes an ad in the paper directing him to meet her one last time. The sound track of this movie was first rate, and the acting was superb.

I really enjoyed Fleur, even if I thought her lover was rather wimpy. The movie is well worth the watch, a must for Hong Kong Ghost film fans!

The difference between Hong Kong films and American films...
...is that, in Hong Kong films, pop stars can act. With this statement, I'm not only thinking about Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in this film, but also Faye Wong in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. Rouge is not the typical Hong Kong movie. Although Jackie Chan is listed in the credits as its executive producer, Rouge does not include spectacular kung-fu fight sequences. The description of the movie printed on the back of my copy of Rouge says it "belongs to a more select category, the Cantonese art film." I can really see this in the opening sequence, which I think is the best part of the whole film. Does anyone know the song that Anita Mui sings in the beginning? I do not speak Cantonese so I can't understand it, but even without the words it is still very beautiful. Director Stanley Kwan artfully balances the tragic main plot (concerning Fleur and Twelfth Master) and the less intriguing subplot (the relationship between Yuan and his girlfriend) to contrast the grandeur of 1930s Hong Kong with the banality of 1980s Hong Kong. The only other Stanley Kwan film I have seen is his more recent Lan Yu, and I can definitely say that Rouge is better.

Ultimately beautiful
The prostitute Ruhua fell in love with Chen Zhenbang from a rich family, but the Chen's family opposed their marriage. Chen decided to leave his family and stayed with Ruhua. But the cruelty of life without the ability and endurance to make a living soon follows. Half a year later, they decided to commit suicide together and promised to stay together in another world. After her death, Ruhua could not find Chen, but she refused to drink the Mengpo soup to forget the past so that she could reincarnate. After 53 years of waiting, she went back plaintively to look for him. But in the end, she found Cheng Zhengbang was still alive and had become a mumbling lowlife old man. Disappointed with his cowardice, she returned him the rough box that she wore for 53 years and left calmly.

The screenplay writer Lillian Lee (also the author of the original novel) often writes in a rather less elegant tone. Never a perfect love story with a faithful couple, but rather one-sided with a determined prostitute, radical about love and a dandy from a rich family with a coward deep inside his heart. But with Lee's extremely versed cultural knowledge and somewhat rebellious style (but not for the sake of just being rebellious), the storytelling always turns out to be poignantly enthralling. Stanley Kwan weaved it so well in every detail without destroying the fluency of the movie or the fluency of my feeling throughout the movie. Artistical without affectation; masterful without pretentiousness, this one easily falls into my favorite type.