Archive for July, 2004
Too Late For Love
One of the finer entries into the Shaw genre I call “moral tragedies,” Too Late For Love sets up an epic battle between the hidebound older generation, played by Ouyang Sha-Fei, in a rare leading role, and the more permissive, starry-eyed young lovers, Su Fen (Ivy Ling Po) and Kuo Liang (Kwan Shan). The result is a more finely balanced version of films like Auntie Lan and Rose, Be My Love that dominated the Taiwan film awards, winning 3 acting awards along with Best Drama.
Su and Kuo marry and, following tradition, Su lives with her new mother-in-law while her husband fights the occupying Japanese. Mom, in the best Jocastic tradition, berates Su Fen for failing to live up to almost every expectation. The dowry wasn’t big enough, the bride didn’t bow deeply enough, her sewing is poor, etc. Considering Su Fen’s love of the color white, symbolic of death in China, it’s not surprising that mom finds her a bit unsettling. When Su Fen is diagnosed with tuberculosis, mom only despises her more, seeing her as a fatal threat to her son and her family. Tragedy ensues, of course, but true love lives on.
It would be remarkably easy to treat the mother as an unabashed villain, a blinkered traditionalist who can’t give up her son. But the script, combined with a nuanced turn by Ouyang Sha-Fei, avoids this trap. Nearly all of Mom’s apparently ugly decisions can be justified if approached from her point of view. And as oppressed as Su Fen feels, she’s also blind to the ways she could make her life easier.
As I’ve said before, these moral tragedies must walk a fine line to appease both older and younger audiences; Too Late For Love walks that tight rope effortlessly, never dismissing mom as a relic and never championing the young lovers as the flawless wave of the future.
The film’s sure-footedness, marred only by its inability to more clearly define the role Su Fen’s step mother plays in this family drama, positions this film as one of the best films about the generational watershed occurring throughout the Chinese diaspora.
In 1967, the first generation of children born after the Communist victory in China was coming of age, a generation who must have had totally different feelings about traditional Chinese culture than their parents who had fled the civil war and whose homeland was starting to fall under Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution. Tales of generational conflict over social mores and family preservation, judging by their frequent appearance in theaters of the late 1960s, had a strong appeal.
Too Late For Love
Released: March 29, 1967
Dir: Lo Chen