Love in a Fallen City

Using the masks and hieratic gestures of Peking Opera as a governing metaphor, Ann Hui describes the social and familial plight of a young divorcée in wartime China. The film centres on her nervous romance with a self-assured, westernised playboy in the Hong Kong of 1941, as the city falls to the Japanese. The loving reconstruction of the period tends to run away with itself, and there are some cloying romantic clichés. An interesting, ambitious failure.