Rouge

Sensual and atmospheric, Stanley Kwan’s 1987 romantic drama stars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung as star-crossed lovers who meet in a brothel. In 1930s Hong Kong, a client known only as Master 12 watches the androgynous Fleur performing Cantonese opera and is immediately smitten. After bowls of opium and subsequent romantic encounters, Master 12 reveals himself as a businessman named Chen, whose family expects him to marry honorably and manage a chain of medical shops. When Fleur suggests they buck tradition and announce their love to his parents, a tragic series of events is set in motion that transcends time and death. For Rouge is also a ghost story, with Fleur returning (“from Hell,” she says) to Hong Kong 50 years later and enlisting a newspaper editor and his girlfriend to help find the lover who went back on his word all those years before. Kwan’s sublime and haunting film evinces nostalgia for a time when people literally died for love, and carries an additional weight since its two co-stars had their own tragic ends much too young, Mui dying at 40 from cervical cancer and Cheung taking his own life at the age of 46.