Rouge: Love Out of Time

Rouge (1987) opens with a shock of beauty—or rather two shocks, in the forms of the young lovers whose doomed romance is about to unfold. In a wordless prologue, a woman (Anita Mui Yim-fong)—clad in a black, dragonfly-patterned cheongsam and framed in close-up against an expanse of floral wallpaper—locks eyes with the viewer, looking into the camera as if it were a mirror. A makeup ritual is in progress: she paints on her eyebrows, then holds a piece of red dye paper to her pursed lips, turning them scarlet. A fade to black transports us to a bustling restaurant where courtesans mingle with suitors, and where one patron (Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing) is making a literally head-turning entrance. Ascending the stairs, seemingly beckoned by a siren song from above, he passes two women whose eyes coyly linger on him; he turns to acknowledge their gazes, his smile suggesting he knew he would have that effect. As he enters a room in which a courtesan is serenading a table of guests, the music stops, as if catching its breath.

Here, in a few swooning minutes, is an encapsulation of what makes Stanley Kwan, the director of Rouge, one of the cinema’s truest romantics. In Rouge, his third feature, and in later films including Center Stage (1991) and Red Rose White Rose (1994), Kwan does not merely tell stories of the lovestruck and the heartsick; he translates their overflowing emotions into an expressive language of desire, characterized by sinuous camera moves and patterned light and shadow. The lovers introduced at the start of Rouge, star-crossed from the get-go, are Fleur (Mui), a courtesan at a high-end brothel in Shek Tong Tsui, the red-light district of 1930s Hong Kong, and Chan Chen-pang (Cheung), also known as Twelfth Master, the scion of a business dynasty. When they first meet, Fleur, dressed in male drag, is singing a song from the Cantonese opera The Sorrows of the Autumn Traveler. (An ode from a scholar to a courtesan, it is a lament of separation and sadness that anticipates what is to come.) Games of courtship play out in mirrored spaces that intensify the lovers’—and our—feelings of vertigo. On Twelfth Master’s first visit to the brothel, Fleur alternates between approach and retreat, keeping him waiting between rounds of mahjong. His gestures of devotion soon become more public and more extravagant: orchestrating a fireworks display that unfurls a message on a scroll; purchasing for their sole use a gold-framed bed, which he has hoisted through the brothel’s central courtyard for all to see.

Twenty minutes in, Rouge imparts another shock with a cut to the gleaming Hong Kong nightscape of the eighties, where we are suddenly with a different couple, Yuan (Alex Man Chi-leung) and Chu (Emily Chu Bo-yee), both journalists. One night Fleur appears in their newsroom—an impossible apparition, wearing the same outfit we saw in the prologue—asking to place an ad for a missing person. It transpires that Fleur and Twelfth Master, their relationship undone by his family, resolved to spend eternity together by killing themselves in a suicide pact. But only she went through with it. After fifty-three years of waiting in solitude, Fleur has journeyed “from below,” as she puts it, to find her lover.

Ghosts abound in Chinese belief systems and folklore. A touchstone of Chinese classical literature, Pu Songling’s Qing-dynasty collection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio has furnished the popular imagination with a rich trove of supernatural shape-shiftings. The Hong Kong New Wave that flourished in the late seventies and eighties was especially rife with hauntings. Rouge, part of that movement’s second wave, was released the same year as one of the genre’s landmarks: A Chinese Ghost Story, a quintessential HK hybrid, also starring Cheung, that cross-pollinates horror, comedy, romance, and martial arts. But Rouge differs from most other HK ghost movies of the time, which were aimed squarely at scares and laughs. There are spine-tingling moments and flashes of humor here—especially as an initially disbelieving Yuan and Chu come to terms with Fleur’s spectral status—but by and large, the film shares the unshakable melancholy of its sad-eyed heroine.

More than a tearjerker, though, Rouge is something like the Platonic ideal of a cinematic ghost story. Put another way, it is a perfect demonstration of the kinship between ghosts and movies. Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema has been called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts represent unfinished business, the persistence of the past. But as the sociologist Avery Gordon has noted, the ghost is a figure not just of the past but also of the future; it reminds us that there remains, in her words, “something to be done.” Ghosts are profoundly cinematic devices, automatic disruptions in space and time. Their polysemous nature—their capacity for allegory and potential to activate multiple forms of temporal consciousness—accounts in part for their ubiquity in the Hong Kong popular culture of the period in which Rouge came out. (It may also explain why Chinese authorities and censors have in recent years clamped down on their representation.) The decades that separate Fleur’s departure from the mortal realm and her ethereal return to it were, for Hong Kong, filled with seismic events: World War II, which brought a Japanese occupation; a postwar influx of refugees from the Communist mainland as well as of global capital; and, in 1984, the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which set the deadline of 1997 for the handover of the crown colony to Chinese control.

Rouge makes a tragicomic running joke of Fleur’s inability to recognize the metropolis in which she has resurfaced. The theater where she attended Chinese opera performances is now a shopping arcade with a prominent 7-Eleven. The Yi Hung brothel, her place of employment and the scene of her fatal overdose, has been razed, replaced by a kindergarten adjacent to the blight of a highway overpass. Kwan renders Hong Kong’s concrete jungle as a coldly lit contrast to the golden hues of the decadent thirties. Yuan and Chu’s modest apartment looks especially cramped and spartan next to the opulent interiors of Fleur’s day. No less jarring for Fleur, whose languid manner suggests an opium haze, is the speed of modern life, as represented by careerwoman Chu, introduced running off to cover a beauty-pageant scandal. The numerical mnemonic that Fleur devises as a secret code for her lover—3811, signifying the moment they chose to commit suicide, March 8 at 11 p.m.—loses its meaning in a data-swamped age of ATM pins and ID numbers. (A pager is what eventually leads them to Twelfth Master.)

Just as Fleur experiences a profound discombobulation in the present, the lost past that she symbolizes stirs up acute mixed feelings in her hosts. Agreeing to help the ghost on her quest, Yuan and Chu are confronted with a romantic intensity that both awes and unnerves them. Modern love in Rouge is a matter of pragmatics, concerned with the here and now; it doesn’t reach for immortality. While Fleur and Twelfth Master committed to a suicide pact after six months, Yuan and Chu remain contentedly unwed after four years together. Twelfth Master’s displays of devotion look even more outlandish alongside Yuan’s eminently practical gift to Chu: a new pair of shoes to replace the ones she wore out from being always on the go. The keening tales of the lovers of yore have an aphrodisiacal effect on the latter-day couple—although after a bout of frantic sex, spurred by their exposure to this alien passion, they quickly come down to earth. Each asks if the other would die for them; without needing a second thought, both say no.

Rouge is hardly unqualified in its nostalgia—more than once, Fleur refers to having been a child prostitute, her virginity auctioned off at sixteen. Her pristine visage is a reminder that she perished in her prime, a victim of gender and class strictures, not unlike the real-life movie star Ruan Lingyu, the subject of Kwan’s prismatic biopic Center Stage, who took her own life in 1935, at the age of twenty-four. (Rummaging in an antique shop, Yuan and Chu stumble upon the story of Fleur’s suicide preserved in an old tabloid—a remnant of the sort of gossip mill that, as we see in Center Stage, made Ruan’s short life miserable.) In a paradox that befits Hong Kong, nostalgia mingles with amnesia. A panicked Yuan, when he learns that Fleur is a ghost, claims to have failed history at school. The scholar Ackbar Abbas has described the announcement of the 1997 handover as a turning point in Hong Kong’s popular culture. The possibility of its disappearance compelled its residents to look at Hong Kong anew, to experience “love at last sight,” as Abbas puts it. It also presented the local cinema with the unique problem of “how to keep pace with a subject that is always on the verge of disappearing.”

Rouge: Love Out of Time

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