Love After Love

Sichun Ma and Feihong Yu           

Ann Hui's Love After Love, from 2020, is a sumptuous romantic melodrama set amongst the very rich in 1930s Hong Kong. Weilong (Sichun Ma), a young and innocent girl from Shanghai, arrives unexpectedly at the home of her wealthy aunt, the merry widow Madame Liang (Feihong Yu). Weilong is naive and awkward and has trouble acclimating herself to the louche and decadent lifestyle of her aunt. Madame Liang strings along a number of men, happily accepting expensive gifts from older men while enjoying trysts with younger ones. Unfortunately for Weilong, she falls for the most feckless of all those young studs, the biracial George (a charismatic Eddie Peng) who beds a large swathe of the female characters in this movie. After Weilong has lost her innocence, in more ways than one, Madame Liang tutors her in the properly improper way to snag and dominate her man. This leads to an ending that is more ambivalent than happy with Weilong realizing that she has turned into the new and improved version of Madame Liang.

Love After Love is essentially about Weilong's sentimental education or, rather, her learning about the necessity of holding sentiment in check if one is to get along in life. The film is based on the novel by Eileen Chang who wrote Lust, Caution and a number of other books that Ms Hui has adapted. Love After Love received only cursory showings in America. A number of critics were put off by its slow pace, but I thought it was appropriate for a film focused on the idle and languorous rich. Hui cuts off the privileged characters from the outside world, which is part of the point. There are no allusions to current events, though I did spy a poster for a Charley Chase film. The production design and costumes are gorgeous, a feast for the eyes. The equally eye popping vintage automobiles are each perfectly tailored to individual characters, particularly playboy George's yellow Rolls Royce. Christopher Doyle's cinematography is as lush and expressive as his work for Wong Kar-wai. Ryûichi Sakamoto's score, one of his best, is a neo-classical delight that underpins this film's rejection of Romantic excess.