An Extra-synthetic Strategy: Ann Hui’s Adaptation of Eileen Chang’s Three Fictional Works

Problematically, the mainstream audience dominantly valued Ann Hui’s Love in a Fallen City (1984), Eighteen Springs (1997), and Love After Love (2020), adapted from Eileen Chang’s fiction, by using “normative and source-oriented approaches,” which Linda Hutcheon (2006) borrowed from Theo Hermans to confirm the impossibility of absolute trans-mediation. Their binary-opposite perspectives to judge upon the closeness of the transformed texts to the source texts largely underrated the voice of the director. This presentation thus intends to neglect Chang’s sublime aura, focusing on the represented chronotopes of the three adaptations that chiefly reveal how Ann Hui visually recovered the textual worlds set in the 1940s and, at the same time, made revisions and additions to contain her (post-)colonial ambivalence and compromise. As many scholars have profoundly conceptualized the (post-)coloniality and Hongkongness of Hui’s cinema (such as Yue 2010, Banerjee 2013, Marchetti 2018), the main concern here would be the concrete ideological context that varies her filmic production. For instance, it is argued that Love in a Fallen City and Eighteen Springs, screened in the years of the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China respectively, do not straightforwardly rephrase the stories with worries and regrets in colonial Hong Kong and pre-PRC China. Besides, as a Hong Kong-mainland China coproduction finalized in a neoliberal era, Love After Love apparently encodes the director’s constraints and bargaining use of expression.