Everlasting Regret (2005)

Released Date: 24 September 2005

Details: 115 mins, PG, Drama

Starring: Sammi Cheng, Leung Ka Fai, Hu Jun, Daniel Wu, Huang Jue, Su Yan

Directed by: Stanley Kwan

Based on Wang Anyi’s Changhen Ge, the multi-award winning novel that was voted the most influential work of the 90s in China. Everlasting Regret follows a legendary Shanghai beauty from her glamorous days to her simpler life, as she struggles to preserve the dignity of her past while surviving the constant betrayal of her men. She stands tall and proud as she bears witness to the waves of changes to her city from 1947 to 1981, until one wave finally overwhelms her.

A person's life is destined to be shorter than that of a city. Having spent her whole life in Shanghai, Qiyao (Sammi Cheng) had her moments of prosperity and her fair share of loneliness. She finally faded and disappeared but Shanghai remains a metropolitan city.Shanghai in the 1940s was glamorous and seductive. A pretty young girl from an ordinary family, Qiyao was lucky enough to win the 2nd runner-up of the "Miss Shanghai" contest. Mr. Cheng (Tony Leung Ka Fai), her admirer as well as a photographer who assisted her to her success, knew the girl was going to live an extraordinary life. It turned out she was going to witness the decades of changes to her city.

"the future becomes the present

the present becomes the past

and the past turns into everlasting regret"

~ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Official Website: http://www.everlasting-regret.com

The Original Novel

Changhen Ge (1996) received the Mao Dun Literature Award, China’s top honor for full-length novels, and was voted the most influential literary work of the 90s. The academia called the novel an epic, a visionary exploration of history and personal experience. Its success was credited to its Shanghai relevance and Old Shanghai nostalgia. It was regarded as the work that revived the Shanghai style of art and literature in the 1930s and 1940s, a very yielding and subtle style portraying the city’s old lanes and the people’s practicality, small-mindedness and small lives. In romance, glamour and ultimate affirmation of traditional morality also appealed to the modern young reader.

Wang Anyi (Author)

Wang Anyi represents the generation of writers whose formal education was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. She is among the most widely read authors of the post-Mao era, a breaker of taboos and a speaker for China’s younger generation.

Daughter of the famous writer Ru Zhijuan, Wang was born on March 6, 1954 in Nanjing. In 1955, she moved with her mother to Shanghai, where she attended school until 1969.

As a member of the "Urban Youth" generation that was supposed to learn from the peasants, she was sent to the Anhui countryside at the age of sixteen, but managed to leave the commune by joining a local performing arts troupe as a cellist in 1973. After the Cultural Revolution, she returned to Shanghai in 1978 to work for the magazine Childhood.

Wang had begun publishing stories in the mid-1970s that were largely based on her personal experiences. They portrayed the humiliations and frustrations in the everyday lives of the back-alley residents of Shanghai or depicted the traditional values that are kept alive in rural areas.

After attending the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1983, Wang's fiction moved away from socialist realism and turned towards psychological exploration, such as her "Love Trilogy” (1986-87) that examined female sexuality and marriage. Her characters are not openly rebellious but express their inner feelings through quiet self-confidence and a strong will for survival.

In the 1990s, Wang’s Shanghai-focused works tapped into a growing surge of nostalgia for pre-Communist Shanghai and cemented her popularity and status. Wang was designated the “Best Female Writer in Modern China” in 1998 and was the head of the official Shanghai Writer’s Association for two years.

Selected Bibliography

2004 Peach Flower in Blossom

2001 Fu Ping

1996 Temptress Moon (screenplay, with Chen Kaige)

1996 Chang Hen Ge

1986-87 Love Trilogy
Love on a Barren Mountain
Love in a Small Town
Brocade Valley

1985 Baotown

1982 Lapse of Time

1981 Rustling Rain