Directed by veteran Zhang Shuihua, whose pre-Cultural Revolution films included The Lin Family Shop (PFA, 1982), A Revolutionary Family, etc., “Regret for the Past tells the tale of a progressive couple living in sin in the politically unstable Beijing of the early 1920s. Perhaps because it's taken from material by the great Chinese
modernist Lu Xun (author of The True Story of Ah Q), theirs is a love story full of tragic ironies. Stirred by a performance of A Doll's House, the upper-class heroine breaks with her feudal family to move in with her intellectual boyfriend. After her relatives manage to get him fired from his job and he's unable to earn a living from his writing, she grows increasingly depressed. He takes this for excessive dependency and, hoping to restore her initial ‘courage', suggests that they part.... The film is evidently Zhang Shuihua's first in almost 20 years, and it's overstuffed with visual ideas--lyrical superimpositions, hand-held inserts, subjectively expanded dramatic scenes, nature montages that verge on the ideogrammatic.... Regret is at once naively obvious and totally cryptic...a combination that's ultimately extremely engrossing. I've only seen a handful of post-1977 Chinese movies, but none of them approach the emotional complexity or stylistic conviction of Regret for the Past.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 1982