March 28 movie: Peking Opera Blues. Georg, Lisa and I saw this on Duke campus Sunday night. Georg and I had rented it years ago, but the subtitles were totally illegible -- the screen had been cropped, so we could see the subtitles in Mandarin, but only the very tops of the letters in English. It says something about the movie's (dare I say it?) operatic quality that I enjoyed it even though I had no idea what the heck was going on. Ever since then I've wanted to see it again with legible subtitles. This time the subtitles were very poorly written, sometimes nonsensical, but at least we could read them.
The movie was great! Completely lived up to my expectations. The only scenes I really remembered from the first time were the very end, and the hilarious scene early on where two women end up on stage at the opera house in the same costume, and the co-star is trying to find out why there are two Wu's tonight, but they all stay in character, singing and performing acrobatics while arguing it out. My favorite line from the scene is when one of the women forces the other one into a split and she sings "Ouch! That's difficult!" while the supporting cast lift her up, still in the split, and carry her off stage.
There was a lot of drag -- not only the opera company, who of course are all male actors, but also Brigitte Lin's character dresses like an Edwardian dandy, and may I say she looks damn sexy in men's clothes -- and I wondered if that was at all shocking when the movie was made.
We ran into Marty from the station and his fiance Robin before the show, and afterwards Marty commented that he had enjoyed the fantasy fighting style. Which amused me because I had been thinking that the fighting was more realistic than I had expected! There was less wire work than you often get in later HK action movies -- for example The Bride with White Hair, also featuring Brigitte Lin (alas, no men's clothes), is full of flying.
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