Red Rose White Rose

Zhenbao sorts women into two headings: the red rose he will take up with, and the white rose he will marry. He has an affair with Jiaorui, the wife of a friend, is happy with her and knows from the start that it will go nowhere; to keep his name intact he marries Yanli, from a proper family, and then finds his wife irritating. The subject of the film is that division itself and what it costs the two women. Stanley Kwan adapted it from Eileen Chang’s 1944 novella of the same title; Chang builds the story through the man’s eyes and then sets the bill down in front of those eyes. Joan Chen, Winston Chao and Veronica Yip take the parts. It was selected for the forty-fifth Berlin International Film Festival. The record’s summary describes both women in the man’s vocabulary, which is precisely the vocabulary the novella and the film are criticising.