Ghosts are a popular subject in Hong Kong cinema, most often employed in kooky comedies and spooky period films. Stanley Kwan (Love Unto Waste, SFIFF 1988) has something very different in mind in his ghost movie, Rouge. Winner of three Golden Horse Awards (Taiwan's "Oscar"), Rouge is a sensuous and melancholy film about a beautiful ghost searching for her lost lover in modern Hong Kong. They committed suicide fifty years ago, intending to spend eternity together in Hell rather than be separated by his disapproving parents. But when 'Master 12' fails to join her in death, Fleur returns to Earth to find him. She befriends a yuppie couple who epitomize the "eighties relationship"-cool, independent, uncommitted. Fascinated by her archaic clothes, language and otherworldly manner, they accept her ghostness with little trouble and agree to help her in her quest. Rouge slips back and forth in time, contrasting the sumptuous brothels and theaters of 1936 Hong Kong with the stark, neon, de-historicized city of today, creating a richly textured look at what David Chute in Film Comment calls, "the ways in which the past haunts the present in a city like history-heavy Hong Kong." Tod Booth