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Price:US$12.95
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The terrible censorship struggles that Cheung Yuen-ting and Alex Law Kai-yui confronted to make the Soong Sisters in the PRC only partially explain the complex failure of this film. It is possible to have various reactions to it at the same time: as spectacle, the film is splendid. Sumptuous period recreations give the film a consistently polished surface. And several key scenes (Chiang Kai-shek's encounter with student protestors; the night-time airplane landing) draw their power precisely from how they look, how they are shot. But the screenplay, and consequentially the performances, seems bogged down: by the weight of its historical significance? by the burden of morally uplifting storytelling that Cheung and Law seem to be laboring under? Too often, the film works through its duty to register China's complex, ambiguous history via the lives of its glamorous principal characters. So the Soong Sisters veers towards cliche; its characters are distilled into embodiments of various principles, causes and options for the Nation. We end up discovering precious ittle about the sisters, as individuals, and what we learn of the Nation seems generalized, text-book-shaped. Stand out performances, though, by Wu Hsing-kuo, as a mesmerizingly charismatic Chiang Kai-shek, Jiang Wen, as an ebullient Charlie Soong, and Maggie Cheung, who almost manages to bring Soong Ching-ling to life.
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