It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy from 1984, directed by Hong Kong genre veteran Tsui Hark and restored last year for its 40th anniversary. It’s a tale of love and mistaken identity, with plenty of farcical hiding in cupboards to avoid the scandal of being caught in a compromising position, and we even get the time-honoured business of having sex with the wrong person in pitch darkness – a plot point stretching back to Jacobean drama.
It’s a wacky love triangle. In 1937 Shanghai, with the Japanese about to invade, a young would-be songwriter nicknamed Do-Re-Mi (Kenny Bee) is humiliatingly employed as a clown in a nightclub and figures he might as well join the army. In the chaos caused by the appearance of Japanese fighter planes, he meets-cute under Suzhou Bridge with delicate, vulnerable Shu-Shu (played by Sylvia Chang, who recently appeared in Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night).
In the moment, they fall in love and swear to meet under the same bridge after the war. Fast-forward 10 years and peacetime Shanghai is hit with hyperinflation (a currency situation mimicking the action’s accelerated craziness), and Do-Re-Mi now plays the tuba in a military band – with much broad comedy caused by his tuba hitting people when he bows to them. He is yearningly looking for Shu-Shu, but she is now an unrecognisably glamorous and elegant nightclub singer, a transformation coolly managed by Chang. Do-Re-Mi doesn’t realise who she is, even though they live in the same building, and now Shu-Shu’s ditsy, scatterbrained roommate Stool falls in love with him. She is played by Sally Yeh with some lovably over-the-top wide-eyed comic acting.
If Tsui really is the Chinese Steven Spielberg, as pundits say, then maybe Shanghai Blues ought to be shown in a double-bill with Empire of the Sun; it’s strange to think that Shanghai Blues is effectively set before and after the action of that film, and yet the sense of liberating chaos and craziness in this westernised place is not a million miles from the serious Empire of the Sun. There are some great scenes in Shu-Shu’s nightclub as she contemptuously spurns the attentions of lecherous businessman Mr To, who is, however, reluctant to be too upset with her. As he explains to the nightclub owner: “Never insult a woman, she may become your boss’s wife.”
• Shanghai Blues is on Mubi from 5 February.
