Archive for December, 2006
The Price Of Love
There are few movies that have successfully tackled love amongst the handicapped. Too often these films fall into easy sentimentality, or excessive moral posturing. The films become about handicaps instead of love.
The advantage given The Price of Love is that it comes from a genre known for excessive tragedy, absurdly overblown trauma and hanky-wrenching finales. Compared to these melodramatic gyrations, the stars’ physical impairments are almost minor.
After Jui Fang (Chin Ping), a blind woman in an abusive household, meets hunchbacked musician Wu Shang (played by real-life hunchbacked musician Teddy Robin), a fairly standard wenyi weepie unfolds. Love gained, love lost, tragedies, musical numbers, etc.
The Price of Love‘s biggest surprise is that it offers very few surprises. Instead of bending the rules of romantic melodrama for its handicapped characters, it never waivers from the Show Brothers formula.
Because it’s so faithful to the blueprint, there’s not much to recommend the film. Beyond Teddy Robin’s folky-crooner songs of love lost and found, there’s little in The Price of Love that really stands out.
The Price Of Love
Dir: Wu Chia Hsiang
Released: November 6, 1970