Reviewed by Alicia Glass
The amazing 4K restoration of a beloved 1984 classic for its 40th Anniversary, Shanghai Blues tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers who, determined to meet up after the war with the Japanese is over, endure all sorts of misadventures trying to find each-other some ten years later!
When our soon-to-be-departed soldier and his pretty lady met under the bridge during a raid, they didn’t exchange names. They did, however, manage to save each-other and make a promise to each-other to meet when the war was declared over. I rather doubt either of them expected it to be some ten-odd years later, but hey, fate is fate! Right?
So it’s some years later, and our pretty little nameless lady is now a nightclub singer generally known as Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang) in Shanghai, older and more experienced and a bit jaded about everything but still kind enough to take in a newcomer fresh from the countryside, calling her Stool (Sally Yeh). Stool is prone to mishaps concerning her money, but never shies away from protecting her virtue with whatever is at hand, or even just her bare fists and powerful voice, if it comes to that. And Stool is just ripe for falling in love, she’s in love with the idea of falling in love, which by turns both charms and irritates Shu-Shu, for she’s still waiting for her soldier from the bridge to come find her.
It turns out, in this slapstick comedy of errors because of course that’s what happened, that a would-be song-writer who took a room above Shu-Shu and Stool’s now shared apartment, is the soldier everyone’s looking for, now called Do-re-mi (Kenny Bee). And while he’s desperately searching for his lady from the bridge too, well, lots of other stuff is going on around them – gangsters and singer rivalries in the nightclub, policemen crackdowns on the tiny beggar community of displaced wounded soldiers that took up residence under The Bridge, the never-ending rat race to make enough money to live on, and oh yeah, the all-important search for True Love.
Of course Stool decides she’s fallen in love and Meant To Be with Do-re-mi, and her consistently informing Shu-Shu that she’ll get a good job so that it’ll just be the three of them – Do-re-mi, Stool and Shu-Shu – together forever and always grates on Shu-Shu’s carefully crafted aloof elegance as a nightclub singer. And perhaps as a woman jaded to the idea of fated love, as well. The three of them adorably chase each-other round and round, and Stool manages through a series of disastrous mishaps to land the cover photo for this years Calendar Queen, catapulting her to instant fame, or perhaps rather infamy.
The series of debacles that was meant to lead to Stool getting molested by the big boss after her Calendar Queen debut party is presented in a slapstick-y way, but honestly, one could not get away with such shenanigans in a movie in the modern world today. A series of power outages might have saved the day and Stool’s virtue in theory, but it’s not something we really want to touch on for the sake of comedy.
Shu-Shu has decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and let Stool have Do-re-mi while she effectively sells herself to plutocrat on a crowded train, but their love is destined, damnit, and Stool is enough of a romantic fool to try and thwart that decision.
The 1984 film was lovingly restored in brighter 4K for the showing, and all the voices had been redubbed in more accurate depictions of the various languages – French, Japanese, variations of Chinese, etc – showing the cosmopolitan nature of Shanghai in the films’ timeframe. Full of shlock and joy, the blues of pursuing life and love and continued happiness, Shanghai Blues is an adorable romp of a comedy of errors and everyone should see it at least once!