Zi mei hua (Twin Sisters)
Zheng Zhengqiu, CN 1934; Screenplay: Zheng Zhengqiu after his novel; Cinematography: Dong Keyi; Music: Zhaozhang He; Cast: Hu Die, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Tan Zhiyuan, Xuan Jinglin, Gu Meijun, Xu Shenyuan. DCP (from 35mm), bw, 82 min. Mandarin with English subtitlesAn early sound film and a huge hit upon its release in 1934, Twin Sisters is a showcase for Hu Die (Butterfly Wu), one of the superstars of early Shanghai cinema. She plays two roles (twin sisters on opposite sides of the tracks) with her trademark subtlety and panache. One, Dabao, lives a life of poverty with an ailing worker husband and an aging mother. The other, Erbao, spirited away from home by her gun-running father as a child, becomes the glamorous concubine of a powerful big city warlord. Using the resources of full-throttled melodrama, liberal-progressive director Zheng Zhengqiu crafts a movie that later leftist Chinese orthodoxy could embrace. It looks like a moralizing story of class struggle: rich haughty sister abuses her poor peasant sibling. But the conflict is resolved with startlingly progressive anti-patriarchal solidarity (sorority, quite literally), not with revolution. A classic "left wing" social drama with unexpectedly subtle inflections. (S.K.)