Superficial retrieval of the past: Ann Hui’s Love After Love

As the most significant adapter of Eileen Chang, Ann Hui relevantly directed three films Love in a Fallen City (1984), Eighteen Springs (1997), Love After Love (2020) and one drama The Golden Cangue (2009). Across over three decades, Ann Hui apparently bears imbricated “anxiety of influence,” which is not as Harold Bloom classically defined as a compulsion of resisting and avoiding other writers / competitors’ influences, but is an ambiguous ambivalence of literally reformatting and creatively reinterpreting Eileen Chang’s original texts. The challenge is that the mainstream audience and critics, usually fans of Chang, dominantly adopted “normative and source-oriented approaches,” which Linda Hutcheon borrowed from Theo Hermans to confirm the impossibility of absolute trans-mediation, to evaluate the achievement of Hui’s adaptations. Problematically, the simplistic judgement as such made upon the closeness of the transformed texts to the source texts not only implicitly impacts on the director’s intention, but also largely shadowed her independent voice and creativity. Therefore, this presentation will neglect Eileen Chang’s sublime aura, chiefly focusing on the represented chronotopes of Love After Love. It intends to reveal how Ann Hui visually, vocally, and textually recovered the fictional worlds set in the 1940s, and why she deleted, added, and revised contents upon the original story. The core argument is set on the adaptation’s minimization of potential references to local political events and attention to coordinating between various sectors towards a level that the director could confidently regard as “at least decent” in spite of wide criticism, instead of embedding a national / urban allegory. An unspeakable context that resulted in the asymmetry of visual-audio and narrative levels is presumably an urge of Hollywoodization-Mainlandization. As the Chinese government and film practitioners were copying the globally effective model of the Hollywood film industry, which both determines consumers’ preference and consolidates the imperial spread of the American culture, Hong Kong directors who hoped to enter the Chinese market seems to necessarily follow the mainstream formulation.