Rouge

Director: Stanley Kwan

1987 / 99min / DCP

Kwan, who would not long after this film’s release become Hong Kong’s first openly gay director, crafts an elegant and enormously moving love story that comments on both changing cultural mores and the persistence of the past in the city’s present. Modern newspaperman Yuen (Alex Man) meets a seemingly disoriented woman, Fleur (Anita Mui), dressed in the garb of the 1930s, placing a “Missed Encounters”-type ad. As it transpires, she’s the ghost of a woman who suicided in 1934, seeking the lover who failed to meet her in the afterlife, played in flashbacks by Leslie Cheung. A beautiful and beguiling paean to a city ever-changing and eternal.