Lei Feng (*) would not approve. In Shanghai, the shining citadel of modern China, it seems that fundamental values – civility, courtesy and selflessness – have all but vanished. In short, the model citizen spirit, prizing good manners and high ethical standards is on the endangered list. In its place, one finds the hustler, whose conduct is governed by the law of the concrete jungle: every man for himself.

To be fair, Shanghai is not the only city suffering from a lack of feeling for one’s fellow man. But such is the depth of the problem that the authorities have taken action. Recently, city officials have arranged public seminars on etiquette, and reinforced the message with a number of publications, including the good manners manual, A Million Families Learning Etiquette, and Recognizing Phonies, a consumer’s handbook that might have helped Lei Feng spot bogus beggars unworthy of his goodwill. Even ‘Little Emperors’ and ‘Little Princesses’ are now being instructed to employ the all-but obsolete phrase “thank you, Mum” or “thank you, Dad”. And not least, there is the anti-corruption campaign.

The success of these efforts remains to be seen, but in the meantime Shanghai’s moral dissipation has provided material aplenty for Hong Kong-based filmmaker Ann Hui. Her latest film, The Postmodern Life of my Aunt, opens nationwide this December, and features a cast of reprobates straight out of The Threepenny Opera.

With all the ingredients that have won praise at home and abroad by critics and viewers alike, The Postmodern Life of my Aunt is an exceptionally good, character driven comedy-drama, albeit one that is suffused with topical societal issues.

Hui’s 21st film revolves around a 60 year old woman, Ye Rutang (award-winning Mongolian ethnic actress Siqin Gaowa), who after losing her job leaves her hometown, the northeast post-industrial city Anshan (and incidentally Hui’s birthplace), for Shanghai. Ye’s trusting nature is severely tested in sin city where she falls victim to a series of scam artists who aim to cheat her out of her life’s savings. The list of con men includes her 12 year old nephew (Guan Wenshuo), who fakes his own kidnapping to extract pocket money from his aunt; a charming opera singer (Chow Yun-fat, absent from Chinese productions for six years) who deals in the futures market for funeral plots, and Ye’s new neighbor (Shi Ke), who claims she needs cash to pay her daughter’s hospital bills. Eventually Ye is bled dry, forcing her reluctant daughter (TV heartthrob Zhao Wei) to come to the rescue.

Adapted from the eponymous novel by Yan Yan, the film portrays Shanghai as a moral vacuum, where only the most ruthless types can survive. At first, this jaundiced view might peg Hui as a cynic, but beneath its bleak surface this film reveals Hui’s sympathy for victim and exploiter alike. “Shanghai is an extreme representation of all the fast-moving cities in the world,” says Hui, “and the fate of all those people who cannot catch up, those who can, and the marginalized.”

Indeed, as with all the films Hui has made in the past 20 years, Postmodern Life is about people – and for people. “I’d call Ann Hui’s films examples of ‘humanistic cinema’,” says David Bordwell, author of Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin. “She’s less interested in technical experiments or physical action than in psychological dramas that reveal unexpected sides of human beings.”

Put another way, Hui has remained true to her ideals. Like other members of the so-called New Wave of Hong Kong directors that came of artistic age in the late 70s, she studied abroad and then worked for television before directing feature films. The New Wave, she jokes, was “an injection of new life into the mainstream cinema”. New Wave refers to the earlier French film movement of the 60s, though its Hong Kong incarnation was in reaction to escapist Mandarin-language studio-based productions – read fantasy kung fu films – rather than French conservatism.

“New Wave filmmakers sought to forge a new vision for Hong Kong cinema, focusing on local subjects, relevant to people’s lives, and spoken in the language people could understand – Cantonese,” says Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the Santa Barbara University of California Michael Berry, who interviewed Hui for his book Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia, 2005).

In the mid-1970s, Hui shot dozens of documentaries and TV dramas before successfully turning to feature filmmaking with The Secret (1979), The Spooky Bunch (1980) and The Story of Woo Viet (1981). The New Wave movement, it must be said, lasted just a couple of years, but Hui’s work has maintained its relevance, first to the people of Hong Kong and later to their compatriots on the Chinese mainland. No matter the genre.

Hui has directed ghost stories, political dramas, martial arts epics, romantic melodramas and comedies. “From the start she tried to make genre films that carried a personal touch,” says Bordwell, adding that her vision is distinct in genre.

Perhaps because she considers film something more than just a commercial entertainment. Hui has often said that she is not a very social person, so it may be that the medium offers her a means of expression; a proxy for life, if you will. In the 1950s, she was sent to an English primary school which did wonders for her command of that language, though at the expense of her Chinese. That said, Hui’s fluency is best expressed visually. In Berry’s book, she revealed that she views cinema as a language, one that can be understood universally, and one that helps her to express herself on contemporary issues.

That command of visual language is evident in films such as Summer Snow and Visible Secret, both of which happened to be commercial successes. There were failures, too. Ordinary Heroes (1999) was lauded by the critics, but it lost HKD 5 million. After which Hui was unable to attract investors and forced to take a teaching job for the next two years. In spite of all her festival awards and critical acclaim, she’s often had trouble financing her films. “It’s very difficult for me to find money in Hong Kong for the kind of films I make,” says Hui. Indeed, at one point, such was the parlous state of her finances that she couldn’t afford an office.

Still, she never sold out. Hui’s humanist approach to filmmaking is, as Bordwell says, “a consistent factor in her career”. Which is not to imply her work is repetitive. In addition to moral issues, exile is a recurring theme in her films (Song of the Exile; Love in a Fallen City) which is not surprising considering her background. Born in 1947 in Anshan, Hui’s father is Chinese, her mother, Japanese. She grew up in Hong Kong where she graduated in English and Comparative Literature in 1972. In 1974, she studied at the London Film School before returning to Hong Kong to work on TV productions. In 1990, she made the abovementioned Song of the Exile (1990) starring Maggie Cheung, a film with strong autobiographical elements. The story is built around Hui’s relationship with her Japanese mother, and their shared search for an identity, no easy task considering the post-war relations between China and Japan.

Likewise, The Postmodern Life of my Aunt is a study of identity and exile. Ye Rutang, a native of Anshan and the product of an era strikingly different from modern Shanghai, is also caught between two cultures. Granted, Hong Kong, or indeed any large city, might have served just as well as Shanghai as a symbol of moral decadence. But with financial backing coming largely from Cheerland Entertainment Organization, Class Ltd., and Beijing PolyBona Film Distribution Co., Ltd. – the setting, for marketing and monetary reasons, had to be set in a city on the Chinese mainland. And so Shanghai was the obvious choice (audiences will note scenes shot in Changfeng Park and along Sichuan North Road).

Unfamiliar with Shanghai, Hui commissioned prize-winning novelist Li Qiang (Peacock) to write a screenplay based on elements peculiar to the city. In the end, however, Hui discovered that “the Shanghainese way of life is very much similar to the Hong Kong lifestyle. Since the early 1950s,” she says, “many Shanghainese came to Hong Kong and chic Hong Kongers adopted, at least in part, a Shanghainese style in terms of clothing, entertainment and food.”

Hui regards consumerism, and the accompanying change in social values, as the inevitable consequence of any fast-growing economy. “Present day Shanghai,” she says, “is reviving the [consumer] lifestyle, and along with it the 1970s/1980s Hong Kong spirit of go-getting.”

Needless to say, the anything goes attitude is part of the parcel.

Although contemporary Shanghai serves to exemplify the materialism and venality of a developing society, Hui doesn’t judge its inhabitants too harshly. “The film begins in a light-hearted way,” she explains, “then moves towards tragedy, but it never quite reaches its grandeur.”
END

(*) Lai Feng was a soldier of the People's Liberation Army. After his death he was characterized by propaganda as a selfless and modest person who was devoted to Chairman Mao. His lifestory was used as an education tool for the masses.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
December 2006 issue