A Time to Remember

Rating:
Summary: Dreadful, except for Cheung and Mei Ting
Review: I approached this film hoping to find another Chinese gem of the type produced by Zhang, Chen, and Wong. No such luck. This is a morally distasteful, cheap melodrama.

As usual, Leslie Cheung is a commanding presence, and Mei Ting redeems herself. But one doesn't have to have sympathy with the hideous Chinese Nationalists to be offended at the film's glorification of the "romantic" communists. Viewers are expected to stomach the depiction of these mass murderers as the manifestation of a valiant dream worthy of heroic sacrifice. One would have hoped that the magnificent Leslie Cheung of Farewell My Concubine would have walked away from this moral spitoon; the "romantic" Reds held homosexuals in even greater contempt that they did the millions of others they slaughtered.

It is difficult to imagine a contemporary film by a German director -- or one of another nationality -- that even hinted at the "romantic" aspects of Naziism the way this one does with its brutal red sibling.