The Love Eterne

The highest grossing Chinese-language film of the era, Li Han-hsiang’s classic 1963 musical opera proved a sensation across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, modernizing a beloved traditional folk tale through Li’s unabashed embrace of the pure artifice of cinema. A young girl disguises herself as a man to attend school and meets her soulmate (acted by a woman); their friendship and eventual romance plays at first like a comedy with a Lubitsch touch, and then as utter tragedy. From painted sets to fake fog, The Love Eterne is cinema as total theatricality, a subject of multiple remakes, and “the jewel in Shaw Brothers’ illustrious crown” (Brian Hu). The film was especially a huge hit in Taiwan, where a young Ang Lee was transfixed. “Some people claimed to have seen it 500 times,” he recalled in a memorable New York Times article. “Every time I see this movie, I cry.”