Everlasting Regret

Starring: Sammi Cheng Sau-man, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Hu Jun

Director: Stanley Kwan Kam-pang

Category: IIa (Putonghua)

For a romantic drama spanning three decades of Shanghai's turbulent modern history, Everlasting Regret is deficient in both passion and Shanghai flavour. But there's plenty of melodrama - both overwrought and sterile - in director Stanley Kwan's visually pretty vignettes, tracing the life and loves of Qiyao (Sammi Cheng) from her teens to middle age between 1948 and 1981, a timeframe that embraces such epic events as the city's 'liberation' and the Cultural Revolution.

The heroine's pulpy escapades, adapted by scriptwriter Elmond Yeung Chi-sam from Wang Anyi's novel, are perhaps better suited for a mini-series. In Everlasting Regret's character-packed 110 minutes, one rarely gets to know Qiyao and the latest man in her life before the movie jumps a decade to another beau and more histrionics - regrettable, because Qiyao's latently riveting soap opera has the potential to reflect the changing politics and social mores of each era.

Instead, we get a series of episodes rife with half-baked crises and cliched dialogue. This applies throughout, beginning in 1948, when Qiyao enters a beauty pageant and emerges as the mistress of a KMT official (Hu Jun). Next, it's 1956 and Qiyao's in love with a rich young man (Daniel Wu Yin-cho), who leaves her and their unborn child for a new life in Hong Kong. From there, the narrative jumps to the late 1960s and the Cultural Revolution, where Qiyao's assignment to rural labour is portrayed as a romp in the countryside.