Taitai wansui (Long Live the Missis)
Sang Hu, CN 1947; Screenplay: Eileen Chang; Cinematography: Huang Shaofen; Editing: Fu Jixiu; Music: Zhang Zhengjiu; Cast: Jiang Tianliu, Zhang Fa, Shangguan Yunzhu, Shi Hui, Wang Yi, Lu Shan, Han Fei. DCP (from 35mm), bw, 112 min. Mandarin with English subtitlesNot all films from Chinese cinema's "second Golden Age" (1947–1952) are political melodramas. Long Live the Missis, set during the tumultuous Nationalist-vs-Communist civil war years, is a brilliant, ultimately bittersweet, satirical, screwball family comedy. Its true auteur was the acclaimed Shanghai novelist/essayist Eileen Chang, who wrote the screenplay. As in her acclaimed novels, Chang depicts networks of smart, morally ambiguous women who find ways to survive while enmeshed in webs of domestic patriarchal oppression. Quick-witted upper-middle-class Shanghai wife Sizhen (a brilliantly comic Jiang Tianlu) schemes to rescue her morally obtuse businessman husband Zhiyuan from both financial and romantic disaster. Her savvy manipulations and lies extricate him from the clutches of an outrageously seductive con woman (a spectacularly flamboyant Shangguan Yunzhu) and her husband/pimp. Controversial when released, Chang's finest screenplay is now regarded as a classic of interwar Chinese comedy and a brilliantly ambiguous subversion of traditional gendered power structures. (S.K.)