Customer Reviews

A Time to Remember

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Despite what the others have said the film is beautifully shot and there are some excellent performances. Apparently the others couldnt get beyond thinking there was no romance in Peoples Republic.

The outside of the dvd case promises a lush, romantic movie,beautifully photographed and mesmerizing. Except for the photography, the rest is a lie.

The story follows an American doctor in occupied Shanghai in the mid 1930's. He is begged by a desperate woman to treat her husband who is suffering from old battle wounds. The wounded man turns out to be a wanted Communist leader and the doctor falls in love with his "fake" wife. In the meantime the Nationalists are on the hunt for Communists which puts the doctor, and his new friends, in a real tight spot.

Sounds exciting, right? There is no doubt that the cinematography is quite good and the shots of 1930's Shanghai are exceptional.
The rest of the film however is very, very boring.

The Doctor has all the enthusiasm and emotion of a wet paper bag. Leslie Cheung is believable as the love interest but her motivations make no sense.One minute she thinks she loves the doctor, the next she wants to love our wounded hero for the love of Communist ideology.

Put all this together with the lead Chinese characters ranting on about the romance of being communist and having little children awestruck in admiration by parades of Maoists make the movie nothing more than propoganda.


On a side note, the subtitles are bad. Words are left out in English, the grammar is awful and there are misspellings. It doesn't detract from the movie....however it is embarrassing.

Despite what the box looks like and the wording on the package, dont believe it.

I approached this film hoping to find another Chinese gem of the type produced by Zhang, Chen, and Wong. No such luck. This is a morally distasteful, cheap melodrama.

As usual, Leslie Cheung is a commanding presence, and Mei Ting redeems herself. But one doesn't have to have sympathy with the hideous Chinese Nationalists to be offended at the film's glorification of the "romantic" communists. Viewers are expected to stomach the depiction of these mass murderers as the manifestation of a valiant dream worthy of heroic sacrifice. One would have hoped that the magnificent Leslie Cheung of Farewell My Concubine would have walked away from this moral spitoon; the "romantic" Reds held homosexuals in even greater contempt than they did the millions of others they slaughtered.

It is difficult to imagine a contemporary film by a German director -- or one of another nationality -- that even hinted at the "romantic" aspects of Naziism the way this one does with its brutal red sibling.