2023-12-09 12:28:00
With great sensitivity, the 90s filmmaker weaves, in “The Soong Sisters” and “Eight Taels of Gold,” the immigrant experience.
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The publisher Spectrum Films always has the good taste of highlighting neglected parts of the history of Hong Kong cinema: here is the turn of Mabel Cheung emerging in the 80s with a predilection for the stories of Chinese immigrants while the countdown to the handover of Hong Kong to China. The Soong Sisters, his most ambitious and expansive film, was released in 1997, a fateful year, and allowed him to tell the story of modern China from a feminist angle. The three sisters of the title, daughters of a pastor who studied in the United States, returned to the country in the 1910s and, proof that history produces the best melos, each married a powerful man. The gap will widen between the youngest Ching-ling, wife of the first Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and future supporter of the communists, and the youngest Mei-ling, wife of the nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, future president of Taiwan.
The filmmaker never gets lost in the crowd scenes and militant raids, always keeping the focus on this singular sorority and its contribution to the political trajectory of their halves. A co-production with China, Soong Ching-ling stands out, of course helped by the insolent cinematography of her interpreter Maggie Cheung as soon as she is dolled up and lit in a costume film. But the filmmaker also vacillates under the eye of the censor, disseminating clusters of ambiguity at the turn of a line (“before, we were slaves of Old China, now, we are slaves of the slaves of Old China”) , an intertitle contradicting such a victory or a threatening scene (Maggie Cheung standing straight in front of a car about to crush her, like an echo of the student facing the tank of the Tiananmen demonstration in 1989).
Delicious bittersweet Time.news
More modest, Eight Taels of Gold (1989) uses the same sense of skillfully composed framework and counter-use: the older sister Soong was played by Michelle Yeoh, star of the action film HK and here, it is her colleague Sammo Hung who abandons tatanes alongside Jackie Chan for one of his rare dramatic roles. That of Slim, an old boy and taxi driver in New York, who comes to visit his parents after sixteen years of absence and weighed down with ingots, an external sign of success (the gold taels of the title). He also finds his long-lost cousin and the possibility of a great love.
The little comic note at the beginning (“made in China, that means long live freedom,” Slim lies to a non-English-speaking Chinese) quickly gives way to a delicious bittersweet Time.news, nuanced and in no way condescending, on culture shock and The immigrant experience: have we really left? Where do we return? “Wherever we go in the world, we will end up in a Chinatown,” the cousin only quips. This life review also excels in its modesty: that Mabel Cheung manages to stretch out the emotional climax more than necessary, without ever tearing up, and to place her characters in a space which will always be more telling than any grand declaration (a panoramic revolving restaurant here, a river there), denotes a precious sensitivity.
Coffret Mabel Cheung : The Soong Sisters (1997) et Eight Taels of Gold (1989) en Blu-ray, Spectrum Films, 30 €.
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