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Flashback: The Love Eterne (1963) – Betty Loh Ti, Ivy Ling Po play star-crossed lovers in huangmei opera classic

Superbly surreal take on a time-honoured operatic tale saw director Li Han-hsiang revel in studio-based sense of fantasy

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Betty Loh Ti (left) and Ivy Ling Po in The Love Eterne (1963).

The seismic change in the nature of commercial Hong Kong cinema and mainstream audience tastes during the past half-century is perhaps best illus­trated by comparing any recent blockbuster with The Love Eterne (1963).

A box-office hit from Taipei to Singapore during both its original release and subse­quent revivals, the widescreen “Shawscope” production could never be made today, with its female-centric cast, Chinese operatic score and a pace too leisurely for viewers accus­tomed to action-packed montages. That is why it is best viewed on a big screen without outside distractions, for director Li Han-hsiang weaves a web of almost surreal artifice that in the 21st century still retains the power to put even non-opera fans under its spell.

The ancient tale of bookish teenage maiden Zhu Yingtai, who masquerades as a boy in order to go to school, and the growing affection she shares with male classmate Liang Shanbo, unaware of Zhu’s true gender, has been filmed numerous times. The Love Eterne ranks among the most lavish versions, making optimal use of Shaw Brothers’ extensive indoor and outdoor sets magically transformed by the design savvy of the studio’s technical and creative teams, all under Li’s legendarily meticulous eye.

Not that the ear is neglected; Zhou Lanping’s musical score takes the huang­mei (“yellow plum”) operatic tunes and subtly modernises them in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their traditional appeal.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Paul began learning Mandarin while in high school, continuing his Chinese studies as an undergraduate at Brown University and Singapore's Nanyang University. After earning a Masters in Fine Arts in cinema at the University of Southern California, he obtained a grant to research Chinese cinema at Peking University from 1980-82. He moved to Hong Kong in 1983 and began writing for the South China Morning Post in 1988. A collection of his articles was published as At the Hong Kong Movies, 600 Reviews from 1988 till the Handover. In addition to writing, he hosted over one thousand movie-related TV shows in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, and had roles in twenty movies. He is a member of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society and the Performing Artists Guild of Hong Kong, and is an advisor to the Hong Kong Film Archives. His research resulted in one of the world's largest collections of Chinese and Hong Kong movie publications, posters, and memorabilia, a portion of which was highlighted in his book, Silver Light, A Pictorial History of Hong Kong Cinema 1920-1970. The collection was recently acquired by the University of California-Berkeley's Starr East Asian Library, which in 2017 launched the Paul Fonoroff Collection as a major research facility for Chinese cinema studies.
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