The Butterflies Return

The Love Eterne is the jewel in Shaw Brothers' illustrious crown. Over forty years after its debut, it remains the most legendary of post-1949 Mandarin-language films due to the fanaticism it sparked in 1963 throughout Asia, especially in Taiwan, where even today the film is synonymous with the ocean of fans gushing over stars Le Di and Ling Po upon their arrival on the island, as well as the legend of the woman who allegedly saw the film over 100 times when it was originally released. With the opening of the Shaw vaults, the digital restoration of the films, and the much-delayed appearance of the films on VCD and DVD, The Love Eterne can now be viewed by those who remember originally seeing and re-seeing the film in spite of poverty and typhoons, as well as by a new generation such as myself who know the film only by reputation and bootleg VCDs.

But 40 years is a long time. Not only have two generations passed in those four decades, but a seismic cultural transformation as a result of Westernization, industrialization, Hollywood-ization, and nativist sentiments has made the film -- a huangmei opera period piece -- somewhat of a mystery to young people in Asia today. Add to that the international circulation of the restored Shaw catalog in the past three years, and you have a lot of people around the world scratching their heads over what those “crazy Taiwanese” (as the Hong Kongers said in 1963) were so wild about. No doubt that will be the case when the UCLA Film Archive brings the restoration to L.A., a city of film buffs, Shaw fans, and Mandarin-speaking immigrants.

Despite the definition of the word, restoration is necessarily a kind of modernization. This is especially the case with the re-opening of the Shaw catalog, where the goal is not so much what looks good for theatrical exhibition or what is historically accurate, but what will look and sound right on DVD, which is how most fans will ultimately see the films. Given the enormous quantity of films recently “restored,” my guess is that these films are not laboriously researched, nor are they the best possible prints scoured for in archives around the world, nor are the physical prints painstakingly repaired. Rather, it seems to me that they are digitally “corrected” and enhanced through a computer matrix which adjusts for contrast, color, and other parameters, while cleaning up dirt and other wear. I tend to agree with the rumors repeated by critic David Chute in a recent L.A. Weekly article that new sound effects have been foleyed-in to create a fuller wall of sound, as with the bird-chirping heard throughout The Love Eterne. A recent viewing of this film and other Shaw releases on the new DVDs reveals that some of the sound effects sound much crisper than the dialogue (as in the famous storm sequence which ends The Love Eterne), a sign that some of the effects may have been recorded on modern equipment.

However, if restoration is just modernization, does that make it imperfect, or worse yet, dishonest? Yes and yes, but it's better to watch the restored Love Eterne and recognize its possible modifications than to not see it at all, because this restoration looks and sounds absolutely stunning. I wouldn't be surprised if it has never looked better, even upon its 1963 release. Comparing the image with that of the original trailer on the DVD, the difference is astonishing. First, the sets, as directed by legendary filmmaker Li Han-hsiang, are revealed to be immaculately designed and staged. It can be argued that the film looks more artificial than ever because the clarity of the image reveals the film's theatricality, but I see that as one of the film's greatest virtues. The sets look painted because they exist in a distant fantasy world (literally distant for mainland refugees in Taiwan and southeast Asia), while the fake smoke permeating from the mountain trails is as dreamy and artificial as the effects in Guy Maddin's films. Details can be seen that were neglected before. I remember a bird that flies from above the camera into the back of the set, a detail easily mistaken as film dirt before restoration. I've only seen the restoration on DVD; I can only imagine (based on the screenings I caught of the UCLA Film Archive's “Heroic Grace” series a few years ago) what details will emerge when it lights up the big screen.

Second, the music sounds great; best yet, Mandarin speakers can now actually clearly hear the song lyrics. The Chinese subtitles are not a nuisance (Chinese films always have subtitles, even when screened for Chinese communities) but an invitation to sing along.

Finally, Ling Po and Le Di look as glamorous as their legends have built them up to be. Every hand motion, every facial gesture, every amusing and double-meaninged smile seems to glow in a way that just doesn't make sense in a faded print. Looking at the faded trailer, one notices that, without the digital restoration, Le Di's bright yellow costume (which emphasizes her femininity and wealth compared to Ling Po's schoolboy blue) during the famous farewell scene has faded to white. As a historian, I can easily complain about the restoration's imperfections, but as a critic, to see The Love Eterne in such a state of elegance is a cinephile's dream.

Yet, regardless of the age or cultural background of the contemporary viewer, visual and aural stimulation will be secondary to the film's conceit, which has -- now that The Love Eterne has re-emerged in the mainstream -- been the crux of nearly every conversation about the 42-year-old film. 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.

Recent scholarly studies of the film as inherently gay have come under attack, and I tend to agree with this dissenting counterargument that such claims assume contemporary, Western models of sexuality on a '60s Chinese genre with its own traditions of acting, singing, and storytelling. Women playing men's parts was common in the genre, and actress Ling Po went on to make a career playing such roles. According to a fascinating New York Times interview with Ang Lee -- who as a child was one of those fanatical Taiwanese who saw the film multiple times and cried with each viewing -- nobody thought anything of the gender-bending at the time. In fact, Shaw was perhaps the most conservative Chinese studio of the era, collaborating with the KMT government on propaganda films like The Blue and the Black, and producing films almost exclusively in Mandarin, the language of the conservatives defeated by the Communists in the late '40s. The films, be they the huangmei operas or the martial arts films, are nostalgic about the ancient past, and few of the films set in the present were overtly about local issues in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, or Singapore, where these films were screened. This explains why Taiwan's fervent reaction to the film was mostly in Taipei, a Mandarin-speaking KMT stronghold, where allegedly 90% of the Taipei population saw the film at least once. That The Love Eterne and the martial arts films of Zhang Che have been re-read recently for their subversive qualities parallels the recent reinterpretations of MGM's Freed-unit musicals -- once considered the most conservative of Hollywood films -- as gay classics. The queering of the Liang Shan-bo and Zhu Ying-tai story has a long history, most famously surfacing above-ground with Tsui Hark's incredible The Lovers, where Shan-bo is torn by the possibility that he may be in love with his male classmate.

Today, The Love Eterne marks the convergence of two important late 20th century trends, the huangmei opera film, and the Liang Shan-bo and Zhu Ying-tai story. The story, like the similar Mulan, is a Chinese folk legend, and has been passed on for centuries. However, the popularity of mass art like cinema and television in the late 20th century has made the story ripe for reinterpretation, from Sang Hu's 1954 mainland film version (which many critics consider superior to Li Han-hsiang's), to Tsui's new-wave reading, to a recent animated feature for children, with songs by pop stars Elva Hsiao and Rene Liu. Especially in Taiwan, the story is incessantly in the mainstream, perennially revived in some form on stage and television. Despite her age, actress Ling Po often appears in the role that made her famous, opposite newcomers in the role of Zhu Ying-tai, since actress Le Di committed suicide in the late '60s.

The film is now considered the definitive huangmei 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. Huangmei opera isn't considered a “genre” of the stature of Beijing opera, in part because it lacks the precision of movement and the expressivity of gestures and rhythm found in other genres. Since it was originally sung by local farmers, huangmei is not characterized by the high-pitched vocals and piercing cymbals and percussion of traditional Chinese opera; instead, it is sung in quick phrases, often in chorus, by non-professional singers. This made huangmei especially suited for popular culture in the '60s, when Japanese modernization combined with Chinese traditions and Western fashions. 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. It's a testament to the persistence of the huangmei style that one of the best mainstream Hong Kong films in recent years is Chinese Odyssey 2002, a comic parody of huangmei films like Three Smiles, The Kingdom and the Beauty, and The Love Eterne. The genre's persistence is also proof that artists and audiences are actively and creatively reinterpreting the films and their styles for contemporary sensibilities and needs, and for that reason, Shaw's digital restoration of The Love Eterne, as well as its appearance on DVD and movie screens internationally, is so valuable today.