The Love Eterne (Liang Shan Bo yu Zhu Ying Tai) - Torrent Details

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The Love Eterne (Liang Shan Bo yu Zhu Ying Tai)

bec2a17e46c275390fc086bdb0da4a3cd66d8e45

The Love Eterne (Liang Shan Bo yu Zhu Ying Tai)
1963
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057248/

38 on the list of 100 best Chinese movies of all time

crossbow0106 wrote:

The beautiful Betty Loh Ti (and also tragic. Like others who were in that era, she was a young suicide) plays Zhu Ying Tai, a 17 year old girl who longs to get an education. In order to do this, she has to disguise herself as a boy. This film is a musical, with her sweet voice singing the plot as it goes along. She meets Shan-Bo, who is a boy who, unbelievably to me, doesn't know she is female (that part of it is minimally disconcerting, at best). Based on a Chinese folk tale (which should give you a hint to what could be), this is an absorbing drama, with a lavish group of sets, as well as two very appealing leads.

Quote:

The Love Eterne is two hours of solid entertainment. The delightful staging and playful songs never hint that it was actually a rush-job - the film had to beat a competing production of the same story to the cinemas. The leads rarely stop smiling for the first hour and a half and their songs are terrific. There's a song for all occasions; a tune for friendship, a song for medicinal remedies, and even one to alternately justify and debunk sexist texts. Traditional song, especially opera, comprises rich discourse and it makes for many strong theatrical sequences.

The direction is hardly spectacular but the sets and costumes make up for that. Worth noting is that King Hu (director of Come Drink With Me, Dragon Inn, The Fate of Lee Khan) was also involved as associate director doing the "action scenes" while Li Hanxiang did the "romantic scenes"*. Also of interest is that the cinematographer is He Lanshan (Tadashi Nishimoto), who also photographed the spectacular Come Drink With Me three years later. If you're up for a good traditional musical, or would like to watch a classy little story, The Love Eterne shouldn't disappoint.

Brian Hu wrote:

Classic Mandarin actress Le Di plays Chu Ying-tai, a wealthy teenage girl who wants to go to school, so she dresses up as a male to attend. On the road, she meets Liang Shan-bo, a working class boy. Ying-tai falls in love with Shan-bo, but obviously can’t show her feelings, so the two swear “brotherhood,” and for the next three years become uncommonly close. When Ying-tai is forced to return home, she, through song, hints to him her gender, but he dopily doesn’t understand. Finally, she asks him, if she were a woman, would he marry her, and he says yes.

For a modern audience, that conceit is already open to a homosexual interpretation of Liang Shan-bo, but if that’s not enough, Liang Shan-bo is played by a woman, actress Ling Po in her Shaw debut: thus a lesbian interpretation as well as a gay one. While I wouldn’t call The Love Eterne a homosexual film, it is certainly open to all kinds of gay, lesbian, and transgender readings, and thus the film’s place as a future camp classic is all but secure.

The film is now considered the definitive huangmei opera film. This opera “genre” has a relatively short history. It derives from folk songs sung by tea pickers in the Anhui and Anqing regions of China, merging with the local Taiwanese gezhai opera when it is moved out of the mainland in the 20th century. The songs were catchy and the lyrics simple, and before long, everyone could memorize entire sequences of the films by watching the films or buying the LP. Popular actors, rather than professional opera singers, could make the films successful, although very often they were dubbed anyway. The quick shifts between short, bouncy melodies into extended phrase endings made the songs dynamic on the big screen and exciting for a younger generation (although the performances do seem slow today).

It’s worth noting that huangmei opera is rarely performed onstage. It is, unlike other Chinese opera styles, a genre that exists only in the cinema, and for that reason it has persisted as Chinese societies enter the multimedia age.

English subs included

Thanks to zenkoan for the upload

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