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Though the main plot of the melodrama is on Qiyao (Sammi Cheng), the story is framed from the perspective of Mr. Cheng (Tony Leung), which is made more visible under the use of Cheng's voice over somewhere in the second half of the film. Hence the "regret", the poignancy of the repeated loss of love, can be one from Cheng as well as Qiyao. There is an implicit parallelism in narrative between Qiyao and Lili in terms of their fate and this is visually reinforced by the similarity of their costume of hair style and dressing.

The film is a visible mutation of "In the Mood for Love" (Dir: Wong Kar-wai, 2000) in terms of filmic aesthetics under director Kwan. It stylistically closely resembles its predecessor in cinematography by adopting shallow focus, asymmetrical framing, cluttered mis-en-scenes, framing of blurred foreground objects, use of slow motion, reflected image from mirror and rear shots of characters. Kwan also imitates the acoustic features of "Mood" by intensively using moody diegetic music. Its narrative structure also emerges from "Mood" under the use of segmented sequences and inter-titles. Yet the segmented narrative structure reduces continuity and weakens causality of events particularly on the how Qiyao starts respectively with Ming (Daniel Wu) and Kela (Haung Jue) in the last two segments.

The marked difference in filmic properties between the film and "Mood" is that Kwan adopts relatively faster cutting in some dialogue scenes to capture the facial expression of the characters. Nevertheless, the camera remains static almost throughout (it comes with even less camera movement than "Mood").

Sammi's staging is too plain. It is not because she does not play the feminist charm well (as commented by some critics). In fact, as Qiyao is not an ostensibly charming and sexy figure, staging of her charm should not be excessively overt. Yet as far as staging is concerned, Sammi's weakness lies in the lack of differentiation in her staging (expression) between the younger and older Qiyao.

The most spectacular visual aspect (other than cinematography) of the film is its grand props and settings that reproduce the image (under an amber tone) of the past Shanghai lifestyle. Apart from originality, it is a stylistically appeasing movie in filmic features but the feel of "a woman in an era of substantial circumstantial change" as stated in the synopsis, if delivered, is not substantially deliberated under its segmented narrative structure that downplays continuity and story causality.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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