Crossroads Zhao Dan, Bai Yang, Lu Ban, Ying Yin, Wu Yin Director: Shen Xiling
Unlike Hong Kong's so-called post-80s generation, whose disaffection is rarely done justice in today's motion pictures, Shanghai's 'post-10s' men and women were brilliantly spotlighted just a few months before the city's 1937 Japanese invasion, in one of Chinese cinema's most highly regarded pre-war classics.
In the masterpiece of his regrettably brief career, director-writer Shen Xiling achieved a balance between topical immediacy and star glamour that makes Crossroads (1937) equal parts love story and political statement.
The plot of two souls who meet by chance, fall in love and nearly lose each other, only to discover they've been neighbours all along, was nothing new even in the 1930s, having already figured in such Hollywood pictures as Pal Fejos' Lonesome (1928). The main difference is that in the case of recent university graduates Old Zhao (Zhao Dan) and Miss Yang (17-year-old Bai Yang, right, in the role that made her a star), they are far from lonesome. He and three mates (Lu Ban, Sha Meng and Yi Ming, all of whom would go on to directing careers) share a ramshackle room separated by a flimsy wall from Yang, a factory worker whose best friend is her lively elder sister (Ying Yin).
Zhao's night-time newspaper job and Yang's daytime employment lead to faceless antagonism over a series of flat-related misunderstandings. As can happen only on celluloid, they meet anonymously and repeatedly on streetcars and the meetings escalate into true love.
If that were all, the movie might have little to distinguish it from Chinese Hollywood wannabes. But there is much more, as the filmmakers create a grittily realistic milieu in which the young intellectuals are constantly buffeted by the winds of unemployment, poverty and the uncertainty of gathering war clouds. Censorship regulations in 1937 prohibited any direct mention of the enemy, but the meaning is clear from the opening scene in which a room-mate attempts suicide because of his despair over the situation back home in the northeast, which contemporary audiences could readily identify as the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.