Love in the Time of Twilight

A Hong Kong comedy of ghosts and time. Yan-yan is a young woman working in an opera troupe. Kai-wai is a bank clerk. They meet by chance and are at each other from the first moment; the relationship starts with a quarrel. Then Kai-wai is killed during a robbery. But he does not go: he comes back as a ghost, and only Yan-yan can see him. What he wants is not simple; to prevent his own death he needs her to turn time back two weeks. From that point the film becomes a story about time: the same days are lived again, the two try to change events, and every intervention produces another problem. The register keeps shifting: broad comedy, fantasy sequences, fight scenes and, in between, a serious love story. That mixture is typical of Hong Kong cinema of the period. Charlie Yeung plays Yan-yan and Nicky Wu plays Kai-wai; the pair had worked with the same director the previous year. Tsui Hark directed. An enjoyable example for anyone who likes Asian cinema and mixtures of genre. For a viewer who wants a consistent register, the film keeps changing genre and some sections are very noisy.