"When your city is no longer your city, history can turn the right man to the wrong choice." With its opening sentence, Everlasting Regret hooks the viewer and for the next 115 minutes never lets go. And what a history it is, though the quote is misleading. This is a woman's tale set in Shanghai over a 40 year period, a period of marvelous historical change. Hong-Kong singer/actress Sammi Cheng plays Wang Qiyao, in her best role to date, taking her from a young beauty-pageant winner in the glamorous 1940s to her days as a simple housewife and mother in the post-Mao area. Released in the Chinese mainland as To Live, To Love, the film is based on Wang Anyi's Changhen Ge, an influential, award-winning novel written in the 1990s. Both the movie and the book shine with nostalgia. In the film the city's past is wonderfully recreated by Hong-Kong director Stanley Kwan and production designer William Chang (in large part responsible for the beauty in films by Wong Kar-wai). Everlasting Regret is influenced by both Wong's In the Mood for Love and Zhang Yimou's To Live, but in the end it is a work that stands on its own, an exquisite and bitter tale of a woman, that like Shanghai itself, is like no other.
Shanghai Film Studios

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
December 2005 issue