Eileen Chang Ai-ling
In an irony as delicious as a twist in an Eileen Chang Ai-ling tale, the 15 years since the reclusive author's 1995 death have seen her fame reach an unprecedented level both in and out of China.
Much of the credit goes to director Ang Lee, whose 2007 interpretation of her 1979 novella Lust, Caution brought Chang's literary and cinematic legacy to the attention of a new generation on a worldwide stage. Add to this the recent DVD accessibility of gems scripted by Chang in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the late 1940s to early 60s, new English translations of her novels and short stories, and seminars and retrospectives such as that currently organised by the Hong Kong Film Archive.
The cumulative result is that Chang is a more ubiquitous figure posthumously than in an earlier era when her works were deemed reactionary by mainland censors and her movies inaccessible to viewers apart from the occasional broadcast on late-night television or a film festival screening.
Doubly ironic, then, that motion picture versions of Chang's oeuvre rarely do the originals justice. The renewed focus on the relationship between Chang's literary and celluloid output underlines the challenge of rendering exquisite writing into indelible cinema. Ann Hui On-wah tried twice with Love in a Fallen City (1984) and Eighteen Springs (1997), but never found the key to transposing Chang's ?lan and nuance to another medium.
Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's Red Rose White Rose (1994) was even less successful, being 'reverential' to the point of suffocation. These adaptations left the plots pretty much intact but shorn of Chang's brilliant use of language to convey subtle psychological insights, they became superficial melodramas in which superstars suffered their love pangs amid pictorially gorgeous recreations of Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1930s and 40s.
Lust, Caution came closest in conjuring a Chang-like mood, but by expanding the prose into a film that took longer to watch than to read the text, it proved impossible to retain the refinement, succinctness and shading of the printed page. Such an expectation, though, is inherently unreasonable, for novels are not cinema and vice versa.
The works that Chang wrote specifically for the screen are necessarily a more direct transcription of her cinematic voice with one major caveat: movies being a collaborative medium, the author had little control over the creative process in general and even less over the final result.
We see a lighter, simpler Chang in the comedies and dramas tailored between 1956 and 1964 for Hong Kong's Motion Picture & General Investment (MP&GI), a studio that put great emphasis on the quality of its scenarios to showcase a roster of talented actresses. Chang's ability to infuse these Mandarin movies' screen personas with life-like details, a sparkling sense of humour and witty dialogue, transformed confections such as The Battle of Love (1957) and June Bride (1959) into joyful escapades for leading ladies Linda Lin Dai and Grace Chang. But it was during her first stint as scriptwriter back in post-war Shanghai that Chang created the jewel in her cinematic crown, Long Live the Missus (1947).
The contrasting characters of sagacious wife (Jiang Tianliu) and gold-digging mistress (Shangguan Yunzhu) were among the factors that made this Chang's most delightful filmic expression.
Over a half-century later, Chang's influence on the literary arts (to which cinema sometimes belongs) is greater than ever, even though her acuity and intelligence are lamentably out of synch with mainstream movie conventions.
Eileen Chang and Film runs from Sat-Mar 7 at the HK Film Archive
