Her Tender Heart
When this film was released in 1959 it ate into
the hearts of Hong Kong filmgoers with its many melodramatic twists and
turns. It also won Lucilla You Min the Best Actress award at the Asian
Film Festival (a fairly prestigious event at the time) in her first film
for Cathay. Though she plays a high school girl in this film, Lucilla was
twenty-four at the time and had already established a solid career with
the Shaw Brothers. Born in Hong Kong, her father was a famous Cantonese
opera singer (Pak Yuk-tong) and she was noticed by Runme Shaw while still
attending school and signed to a contract in 1952 at the age of seventeen.
Over the next seven years she made over 20 films, but ended her relationship
with the Shaw Brothers and signed up with Cathay (then MP & GI) in
1958. With Cathay she was to have her biggest successes – Sun, Moon and
Star (Best Actress at the first Golden Horse ceremony), All in the Family
and A Night in Hong Kong. She married and retired in 1966 at the age of
29.
In this old fashioned sentimental film, she goes
through a myriad of emotions – from first love, to a wrenching discovery
about her past, to dealing with tragedy, to having to come to terms with
what “family” really means. She captures each emotional phase with genuine
feeling and authenticity and always seems true to her high school girl
sensibilities. For whatever reason, the film didn’t really grab me other
than during an occasional heart felt moment though it certainly has all
the ingredients in place. Part of the issue may be that the bond between
two of the characters feels so strong that any other outcome than the one
that occurs seems impossible – and thus much of the potential drama leaks
away. At the same time this is a touching and somewhat unusual story about
a tender love between a father and his daughter.
Li Peiying (Lucilla) comes home one day after
school to find her Auntie, Gu Yunmei, waiting for her. Gu has been
living in Italy for many years and Peiying has never met her – as far as
she knows. It soon becomes apparent to the audience that in fact Gu is
the mother that Peiying had been told had died many years ago. She had
left her husband (Wang Yin) and small child to run off with another man
(Lan Tianhong) and settled in Italy where they became quite wealthy. Now
after these many years she has returned to see her child but in an agreement
with her ex-husband she has to pretend to be Peiying’s aunt. In some ways
it is fairly complex – she clearly loves her child and in a flashback we
see how much it hurt her to leave her behind, she also loves her current
husband and abandoned her family because she was stuck in a loveless marriage.
Yet the bond and feelings between the daughter and father are very clear
as they dote on each other – so one is torn as how they want this to play
out.
During all of this Peiying falls in love with
a handsome doctor (Zhang Yang) and life seems very bright – until she overhears
a conversation that jolts her with the truth – and not only that but also
that her mother wants her to come to Italy with her for a better life and
to study music. More tragedy is to come and more discoveries about her
past emerge. Unfortunately, the edgy dynamic slowly disappears as one begins
to lose a great deal of sympathy for the mother once her not very nice
husband shows up. From this point on the film feels like by the numbers
melodrama and creates little tension.
As a note of interest, the actress who plays Gu
Yunmei might be familiar to “Girls with Guns” fans as she was to play the
avenging matriarch 31 years later in Widow Warriors. Wang Lai was one of
the more skilled character actresses of her time and was nicknamed the
“actress with a thousand faces”. Born in Beijing, she moved to Hong Kong
in 1952 and was to act in over 200 films in her long career. She won the
Golden Horse Best Supporting Actress award four times and may be familiar
to some also for her work in Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands or Ann Hui’s My American
Grandson.
The DVD from Panorama is suppose to be region
3, but I was able to play it on my region 1 player. For such an old film,
the print is in reasonable condition - some scratching at times and some
scenes look over exposed.
My rating for this film: 6.0
The information on Lucilla and Wang Lai comes
from "The Cathay Story" published by the Hong Kong Film Archive.