Part fairy tale, part ghost story, The Princess Yang KweiFei, set in eighth-century China, tells the story of Huan Tsuang, the last T'angemperor, who falls in love with a servant girl (Machiko Kyo) and makes her hisempress. The film's incredibly moving final scenes show Huan Tsuang losing hisCinderella, then regaining her in a mystical embrace from beyond the grave.Mizoguchi's only Chinese subject was produced by Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw. AndrewSarris called it "one of the most beautiful films ever to treat beauty as asubject. Beauty and memory and vanity°.The backgrounds are unusually fake for alyrical landscape artist like Mizoguchi (but it was) produced in the '50s whenmany realists began experimenting with abstract styles and revolutionary conceptsof color°.Yang Kwei-Fei is ultimately an introspective experience expressed inmordant blues°.Of all the filmmakers I have ever seen, Mizoguchi comes closest toexpressing through the formal unity of his mise-en-scène somethingapproximating Sophoclean irony."