The Wild, Wild Rose. 1960. China. Directed by Wong Tin-lam. Screenplay by Qin Yifu (aka Nellie Chin Yu). With Grace Chang, Chang Yang, Dolly Soo Fung. North American premiere. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 134 min.
Long before Wong Kar Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang made melodrama out of popular musical ballads (and Johnnie To action out of balletic choreography), there was Wong Tin-lam, a prolific Hong Kong director of musicals, tearjerkers, and wuxia (martial arts movies). Wong found his muse in the iconic singer and actress Grace Chang—the embodiment of the New Chinese Woman as a “mambo girl”—collaborating with her on six films, including The Wild, Wild Rose, which remains beloved to this day among a certain generation of Chinese audiences. A cosmopolitan retelling of Bizet’s Carmen, the film is best remembered for Grace Chang’s nightclub numbers, about which the scholar Kevin B. Lee would observe, “The butchiness of her stentorian singing makes her ripe for camp appreciation among contemporary Sino-queers, including Tsai Ming-Liang, who offered touchingly makeshift homages to her song and dance numbers in The Hole (1999).”
4K digital restoration by Hong Kong Film Archive; courtesy of Cathay-Keris Films Pte Ltd.