1. Introduction

The two films to be presented in this paper were produced in the 1980s at the height of Hong Kong’s popularity as an Asian film hub, although they both reflect an unfamiliar side of the city’s cultural ethos. Their historical concerns with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between December 1941 and August 1945 mask the underlying allegorical subtext. The latter is connected with the Joint Declaration between Britain, the occupying colonial power and communist China, to whose sovereignty Hong Kong was now destined to revert in 1997. My paper will discuss the subtle intertextual mosaic of the film’s treatment of these previously repressed subjects and explore its allegorical treatment of Hong Kong’s ambivalent feelings of assertive pride in economic progress and anxiety about occupation by the colonizer (Britain), the would-be colonizer (Japan) and the future master (China). History is very much in the making as this pair of films reflects.

Recent historical studies of the Japanese occupation and of Hong Kong’s modern history will be referred to in order to elaborate and explain the fictional treatment of the period depicted in both films. For example, the Repulse Bay Hotel set recreated especially for Love in a Fallen City made architectural history as a permanent, retro-style architectural feature of the contemporary city based on a film set reconstruction. After the film was completed a copy of the part of the demolished hotel that had been used for the purposes of the shooting was incorporated into the design of the new Repulse Bay Hotel The intersection of history, fiction (Chan Koon-Chung’s screenplay/ story for Hong Kong 1941 and Eileen Chang’s celebrated novella Love in a Fallen City provide the fictional sources) and socio-political allegory is not uncommon in Hong Kong cinema. To what extent the films’ respective subtexts invoke a patriotic discourse or something darker is very much germane to the scope of present discussion.

2. Allegory and Film

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons and actions in a narrative, are associated with another meaning or set of meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. These underlying meanings usually have a wider moral, social, religious, or political significance. The word’s derivation is a from a Greek term meaning, ‘speaking otherwise.’ According to J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theories, ‘the form may be literary or pictorial’ and it ‘has no determinate length.’ (1991: 22) Often seen as being situated on a continuum of literary devices from symbol and metaphor to parable and myth, the allegory tended until the 20th century to be associated with religious themes and subjects. Following fresh interpretation on the dialectical nature of allegory in Walter Benjamin’s work, allegory in its modern usage can be seen as a secular aesthetic device as opposed to being a purely religious impulse. In his writings, especially the long concluding section on allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where he adumbrates important distinctions between the symbolic and the allegorical in a modern context, Benjamin laid the foundation for broader cultural applications and a less restrictive critical and creative discourse. Referring to the ‘eruptive expression of allegorical interpretation’ (1998: 175) Benjamin discusses the possibility of allegory in relation to the visual and the spoken, both of which are relevant to drama and subsequently cinema.

As Ismail Xavier has pointed out in relation to film allegory as well as to contemporary culture in general, since Benjamin’s ground-breaking work on the device ‘the re-evaluation of allegory—not only as a language trope but above all as a key notion in the characterization of the crisis of culture in modernity—has become a significant topic of research and cultural debate.’ (2003: 293) Admittedly, one major difficulty in identifying allegory lies in the complexities of the hermeneutic systems in which it is embedded. As a literary (and indeed cinematic) mode of expression, allegory is primarily connotative in its frame of reference. In other words the literal or denotative significance co-exists alongside a more emblematic, connotative basis of interpretation. Reception of an allegorical work may evoke the first level of meaning but not necessarily the second, without apparent loss of narrative meaning for the viewer/reader. In consequence, the full range of encoded signification on the part of the film maker may not be decoded and construed by many or even most of the audience. Much may depend on variable factors such as topicality or synchronicity, as is the case with the unexpected, arbitrary relevance or sudden re-emergence in popularity of classic works of literature and drama. These factors are inextricably bound up with the complex fact-fiction interface between the worlds of external reality and imaginative representation. Current events and actuality, as commodified and packaged by the media, inevitably determine what is topical and popular in a popular cultural medium such as film. The topicality of a film may be more obvious and its socio-political frame of reference easily discerned, or on the other hand its sub-textual associations and connotations may be more subtle, and even optional, for the viewer.

In film history a number of great works are held to represent outstanding examples of allegory including Metropolis (Lang), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel), Orchestra Rehearsaland Eight and a Half (Fellini) 2001 A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) and Rashomon (Kurosawa). A more recent example by an Asian director would be Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet, in which the three protagonists are clearly intended to represent China, Taiwan and the United States at a time of international tension over deteriorating cross-straits relations. Li’s implicit call for mutual understanding between the three political entities is of course skilfully wrapped up in an engaging narrative that can be – and almost certainly was by many cinema-goers – interpreted at more literal levels of meaning. Thus, the film medium’s tendency toward psychological realism and literal depiction of subjects and situations frequently inhibit more subtle readings or transferred textual meanings.

Ackbar Abbas’s authoritative study of Hong Kong cinema in his ground-breaking cultural critique, Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance includes references to the many gangster films that ‘can be read as allegories of 1997’ (1997: 24). As Abbas goes on to point out, ‘More often than not, these films do not make any direct reference to Hong Kong’s political situation, and they cover a wide spectrum of popular genres. Nevertheless, as films they are both products and analyses of a cultural space of disappearance, as well as responses to it’ (ibid.). Abbas refers to a number of films that exemplify this tendency, especially those of Ann Hui, Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan. His study focuses more on disappearance, displacement and ‘the slippery nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space’ (1997: 20) than on allegory per se. As he argues persuasively, the imminence of 1997 created a new kind of cinema in Hong Kong from 1982 onwards: ‘Three films released in 1982 can be taken to exemplify this moment [i.e. the birth of a new generation of Hong Kong filmmakers]… But 1982 was also the year of Margaret Thatcher’s visit to China, which began a process of negotiation that culminated in the Joint Declaration of 1984, returning Hong Kong to China in 1997. The Joint Declaration caused a certain amount of anxiety, even though one of its terms is that the sociopolitical structure of Hong Kong will remain unchanged for fifty years (according to the slogan, “One country, two systems”).’ (1997: 23) Arguably, though, the Hong Kong films referred to in Abbas’s compelling study, because their apparent allusions are more fleeting, offer a less sustained framework for allegorical interpretation on the grounds of historical and geographical specificity than the somewhat overlooked Love in a Fallen City and Hong Kong 1941 do. In the subsequent parts of the paper this claim will be discussed and substantiated in more detail.

More recently, writing of ghost films as socio-political allegories in the Asian context, Bliss Cua Lim observes that such ghost films (Stanley Kwan’s 1986 Rouge being a good example) tend to transcend the “singularity” of historical events and stretch or distort linear, progressive temporal frameworks:

The hauntings recounted by ghost narratives are not merely instances of the past reasserting itself in a stable present, as is usually assumed; on the contrary, the ghostly return of traumatic events precisely troubles the boundaries of past, present, and future, and cannot be written back to the complacency of a homogeneous, empty time. The ghost always presents a problem, not merely because it might provoke disbelief, but because it is only admissible insofar as it can be domesticated by a modern concept of time.

As we shall see, the two films discussed here fall within the category of traumatic historical events to which Lim alludes, and both set up thought-provoking correspondences between past, present and future. Lim’s article posits the view that the ghost film as allegory enables social, historical and political issues to be explored in a subconscious manner through which some form of catharsis may be achieved, or at least an oblique form of exorcism of taboo subjects in Asian communities, obsessed as many modern communities are with pragmatic, progressive agendas and a corresponding avoidance of past and future.

A further example of socio-political allegory in a Hong Kong cinema context would be Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, in which the number of the hotel room also stands for the year by which Hong Kong and Mainland political systems are intended to become fully merged and integrated. Wong’s laconically allusive, frequently ludic and deliberately opaque approaches to filmic signification tend to make his narratives resistant to confidently straightforward exegesis, and it seems likely that the title itself is a playful or mischievous reference. Another great stylist of contemporary Hong Kong cinema, Johnnie To Kei-fung, is a master of socio-political allegory and, as critics have perceived, his thinly veiled references to post-’97 politics and the relationship with China is most powerfully conveyed in his two Election films of 2005 and 2006. The English title (though not the Chinese one which refers simply to the Triads) emphasises the political allegory, if somewhat ironically, since Hong Kong people are denied the opportunity to elect their Chief Executive. Writing in AM Post (3 July 2006) the film critic Siu Heng unequivocally identifies this allegorical import: ‘Precisely because Johnnie To has voiced out the grievances that many Hong Kong people are sharing, he leaves no room for an alternative interpretation of Election and Election 2 except as an allegory of Hong Kong politics.’ Laikwan Pang, notably, has identified many of To’s post-’97 films as being allegorical in nature. To is, however, famously reluctant to complete the dots for interviewers or media commentators, when he is quizzed about the signifying codes and connotations of his films such as Election, PTU (2003) and Sparrow (2008). These can all be seen as veiled contemporary commentaries on Hong Kong’s socio-political system and its relationship with the China Mainland, as commentators such as Pang have argued, but in interview with the present author (August 2007) the director was reluctant to expand on the implicature of his work, asserting that as an artist he leaves interpretation to the individual viewer.

Thus, in spite of the well-merited international popularity of Hong Kong cinema over recent decades, it is generally true to say that simplistic stereotypes and culturally blinkered perceptions of Hong Kong’s cinema have tended to affect their systems of production and reception. Strangely this is a more of an endogenous cultural factor than an exogenous one. Hong Kong cinema has attracted more and more interest and critical attention externally in the past ten to fifteen years. Within the local industry, however, it is a different story. Anything approaching art-house cinema in the city’s film industry tends to be seen as a pretentious and self-indulgent exercise in vanity and obscurity (which explains why Wong Kar-wai is much less fêted locally than he is abroad). Perhaps this is why many directors have avoided making claims for their films that go beyond the realms of pure entertainment and escapism. Films based on literary works – unless they are comic spoofs or travesties – remain relatively rare.

The recent transposition of another Eileen Chang novella, Lust, Caution, to the screen under the direction of Ang Lee (2007) has made Eileen Chang’s work more topical and perhaps this topicality can justifiably be extended to Ann Hui’s film treatment of the better known Chang fiction Love in a Fallen City. Although the narrative is likewise set against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation and entails the involvement of an ambivalent female protagonist with an enigmatic and powerful male figure, there appears (to this viewer at least) to be less scope for reading Lust, Caution allegorically. Indeed there seems to be more of a case for seeing the latter as an intelligently crafted adaptation that employs poetic licence in putting flesh on (an apt metaphor considering the film’s imported sex scenes) the skeleton of Chang’s highly condensed narrative until it becomes a fully blown historical epic, one of a spate of Chinese historical epics of the present decade.

3. Love in a Fallen City and Hong Kong 1941/Waiting for Daybreak

Two decades before Lust, Caution when Love in a Fallen City and Hong Kong 1941 were released in 1984, allegorical interpretations were probably less bandied about by critics, even if the year itself seemed portentous on account of its literary associations. The two films were, on the surface, historical accounts of Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, and there appeared to be no reason to seek for further frame of reference. The Eileen Chang novella, from which director Hui adapted Love in a Fallen City, is set partly in Shanghai and partly in Hong Kong, although the December 1941 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, which is the background to the last part, seems tangential to both source novella and film. However, the central motif of the ‘Fall’ is of critical importance to any understanding of both texts in relating the protagonists Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan to the setting and allegorical framework: ‘Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall that she could be vindicated?’ (2006: 167). The Fall, then, is intended symbolically, as well as literally, and unites the political sphere with the personal, the broader resistance and surrender motif with that of individual love. Hong Kong 1941 is less oblique in its reference to the invasion and occupation, although it does not seek to depict the defence and fall of the city in any detail. Rather, it portrays the triangular relationship of the protagonists against the background of Japanese occupation of the city and the climate of fear that it engendered. In its Chinese title the film is more metaphorical than the literalistic title of the English language version. In Chinese, Dang Doi Lai Ming means ‘waiting for daybreak’, which has a double reference to the female protagonist Nam’s morning vigil in memory of Fay who sacrificed his life for her and her fiancé Keung and to the daybreak of liberation from the occupation.

Interpreted allegorically, however, both films can be read against the Hong Kong events of the year in which they were made. 1984 was the year of the Joint Agreement between Hong Kong and Britain over the future of Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s retrocession to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 was now a certainty after a long period of negotiation, during which Britain attempted to assert their historical right to sovereignty under the terms of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ by which Hong Kong itself was ceded in perpetuity. The New Territories – leased to Britain in 1998 for 100 years – were not however. Hong Kong people were not surprisingly apprehensive about the terms of the projected handover of sovereignty, especially bearing in mind the atrocities and excesses of the Cultural Revolution, still fresh in their memory. The Tiananmen massacre of 1989 was yet to come, of course, but the collective anxiety of the population in the first half of the decade concerning the Mainland’s scheduled repossession of the Territory was palpable. Thus, both films brought into play this sense of apprehension in the popular consciousness as well as communicating with the collective unconscious of the community at a subliminal level by depicting the previous occupation of the Territory in the days when it was referred to as a Crown Colony.

Whether consciously or sub-consciously Ann Hui and Po Chieh-leong, the respective directors, invoked the spectre of invasion, occupation, anarchy, brutality and chaos, all of which was highly suggestive in the minds of Hong Kong people in relation to what might happen when Hong Kong was ‘returned’ to China in the near future. A decade later China employed its own filmic political message in the treatment of the subject of Hong Kong’s annexation by Britain. The Opium War (1997) was intended to remind Hongkongers of their roots and heritage and of Britain’s cynical manipulation of trade in the mid-19th century to China’s detriment. There was a distinct feeling of synchronicity in the appearance of all of these films, and the timing of their release cannot be attributed to mere coincidence. At the same time the practical factor of the recent demolition of the original Repulse Bay Hotel in preparation for the erection of the present structure, was a consideration for director Hui. She had the actual façade reconstructed as a film set and used the ballroom to represent the ballroom of the long-gone Hong Kong Hotel alluded to in Chang’s fiction. Hui’s impressive and relatively successful film for Shaw Brothers prompted the owners to include a pastiche of the original Repulse Bay Hotel in their final design in order to preserve something of its aura. This was where in the days leading up to the Christmas Day surrender British and Canadian troops, as they did elsewhere on Hong Kong Island but not on the Kowloon peninsula, put up a spirited resistance.

Eileen Chang’s nostalgic love story, from which the film is closely and, one might say lovingly, adapted, focuses on Bai Liusu (Cora Miao), a divorcee from Shanghai, who suffers under her family’s constant recriminations for her failed marriage. She agrees to accompany a family friend who is leaving on a trip to Hong Kong, where she meets Fan Liuyuan, a jaded Malaysian Chinese playboy (Chow), with whom she gradually embarks on a hesitant but seemingly frustrated courtship triggered by their shared spontaneous passion for ballroom dancing. The relationship subsequently blossoms into an obsessive affair against the backdrop of a supercilious but outmoded colonial British presence. It is precisely at this point that the Japanese 23rd Army invades the British colony, thereby precipitating a crisis, which ironically succeeds in breaking down the repressive and stifling sense of decorum mingled with uncertainty that had inhibited the pair up to this point. Trapped, as they are, in the besieged Repulse Bay Hotel and no longer conditioned by social normality, their sense of inhibition and the ironic detachment that masks their mutual attachment evaporate. Paradoxically, the Japanese annexation of Hong Kong liberates them by sweeping away the old attitudes and values of the complacent pre-war city.

Although the film largely eschews the wider socio-political context of the colony’s short-lived resistance and brutal occupation by the Japanese forces, one memorable shot depicts the lowering of the British flag and the raising of the Rising Sun on a launch, from which the image makes clear the Governor (Sir Mark Young) was embarking on the humiliating short trip to Tsim Sha Tsui in order to surrender to the Japanese invaders at the Peninsula Hotel. The potent symbolism of this scene would not have been lost on the contemporary viewer in Hong Kong, who had read in her/his newspaper of the inevitable outcome of the Joint Negotiations between Britain and China concerning the territory’s future. For those Hong Kong families that saw themselves as refugees from China’s communist system, the future may have looked almost as bleak as the scenes of defeat and surrender depicted in the film. Indeed for a time Britain was considered to have sold out Hong Kong, especially in view of the Thatcher government’s determination to keep ordinary Hongkongers out of Britain by denying the validity of their British National Overseas passports. Naturally such measures did not apply to very wealthy Hong Kong citizens, those that historian Philip Snow refers to as the Hong Kong ‘gentry’. At the critical moment of the June 30, 1997 Handover ceremony the Union Jack was lowered and the Chinese flag raised in a process that appeared to virtually exclude Hong Kong people, which was exactly what had happened 52 years earlier.

With great fidelity to her source text, Hui too, a local Hong Kong director with a reputation for critical, socially aware film-making, foregrounds her non-local protagonists, but hints at the plight of the local population in one or two street scenes following the occupation. Her virtuoso scenes, however, are those filmed at the Repulse Bay Hotel, where Bai and Fan are resident. The fighting is depicted from the perspective of the defenders and the mix of expatriates and wealthy Chinese guests in the hotel. As Philip Snow notes in his lucid historical study, The Fall of Hong Kong, ‘a contingent of stragglers under the command of Major Robert Templer staged a valiant defense of the Repulse Bay Hotel’ (Snow, 67). A fictional version of Templer, renamed Templeman by the screenwriter, appears in the film together with British troops, stationed in Hong Kong in the 1980s as extras representing the British and Canadian battalions who resisted with such unexpected determination.

Only towards the end of the film are the invaders depicted on screen. Up to that point they are an implicit presence, but when they appear, the film language suggests a sense of alien invasion and shock. As Bai and Fan emerge gingerly from the shelter of their bedroom after the bombing, the allied soldiers having been evacuated, they come face to face with a Japanese soldier. A subsequent shot of Japanese soldiers and an officer on a white horse in Bai’s dream reinforces the idea of alien presence. Bai’s and Fan’s sense of detachment from the circumstances, as Shanghainese and Malaysian Chinese respectively, despite their physical presence in Hong Kong at the time of the invasion, is evident. It is as though Hong Kong’s fall does not have much to do with them except to promote the conditions by which their love for each other can find expression and come to fruition.

Hong Kong 1941 is set against the backdrop of the occupation rather than the fall of the city as Love in a Fallen City is. Fay (Chow) is a resourceful young man with no real family ties in Hong Kong, who is trying to realize his dream of emigrating to the United States. After he is discovered attempting to stow away on a ship full of expatriate families being evacuated from the imperiled colony and coolly jumps ship, he befriends Keung (Alex Man), who comes from a wealthy family, but is now a coolie working for a successful rice merchant. Keung’s childhood friend, Nam, has been promised to a rich young man by her scheming father (Shih Kien). The trio almost succeeds in escaping on a boat on the day the Japanese advance reaches the city but they are obliged to stay behind since Keung is delayed by his concern for a poor, delusional vagrant. They stay and attempt to make the best of the occupation and Keung obtains Nam’s father’s permission for their marriage. Being less naïve than his friend, Fay realizes that the Japanese soldiers’ barbaric practices do not accord with their propaganda about liberating fellow Asians. In order to expedite their escape plans Fay decides somewhat controversially to feign collaboration with the Japanese occupiers. Nobly suppressing his own more-than-platonic feelings for Nam, while attempting to ignore her evidently reciprocal emotions, Fay does his best to maintain this triangular relationship to the point where something has to give. When it does, Fay’s self-sacrifice for his friends is eloquent and affirmative testimony to the better side of the human spirit following the compromises and degradations of the Japanese occupation.

Playing wealthy playboy Fan Liuyuan in one 1984 film and charismatic poor relation Fay in the other illustrated the virtuosity of Chow-Yen-fat at a relatively early stage of his career before the international acclaim for his central role in 1986’s A Better Tomorrow. However his character of an aspiring, intelligent and ultimately self-sacrificing young man in Hong Kong 1941 may be seen as closer to his actual Hong Kong persona and his charismatic interpretation of Fay brought him the recognition of Taiwan’s 1984 Golden Horse award for best actor. His stellar career has accompanied Hong Kong’s own economic ascendancy as well as the vicissitudes of the past thirty years. Embodying the typical Hong Kong characteristics of hard work and independent-mindedness, Chow may be regarded as a Hong Kong icon, and as such representative of its contemporary success story. The character he plays in Hong Kong 1941 aspires to emigrate to Gold Mountain, signifying the United States, just as many people of his generation resolved to leave Hong Kong for the West during the ‘80s and ‘90s amid the pessimism surrounding Hong Kong’s future. The fact that he fails to do so just when freedom and opportunity seem to be within his grasp, sacrificing himself for the sake of Nam and Keung by blowing up the Japanese patrol boat, is a sadly ironic twist to the film’s ending. Nam and Keung, given the opportunity to emigrate thanks to Fay’s noble act of self-immolation, both end up returning to Hong Kong for the rest of their lives.

Hong Kong 1941 depicts a sadistic general named Kanazawa, perhaps based on the real-life Kempeitai (or secret-police) chief of the same name. Unlike the fictional character played with great authenticity by Hong Kong actor Lam Chi-kit, the real-life Kanazawa survived. As Snow has elucidated, the Japanese commanders who supervised the occupation of Hong Kong received lenient treatment at the post-war trials in spite of the atrocities committed in the fallen city during their watch. Our man Chow metes out lethal punishment to the fictional Kanazawa, preventing him from raping Nam and killing Keung in a scene that prefigures his ultimate self-sacrifice in the trio’s flight from Hong Kong. Moreover, director Po Chieh-leong’s cameo role in the film as the vagrant – a crazed graffiti street-artist who starves to death when the Japanese invade – is almost certainly a nod to the so-called Emperor of Kowloon, Tsang Tsou-choi. Tsang, a real-life street artist defied colonial and post-colonial administrations for many years adorning public spaces with his graffiti protests. His public demonstration of dissidence and defiance of colonization (and latterly indirect rule from Beijing) became a recognizable art form on the streets of Kowloon, and now that he is gone he is missed by some in Hong Kong, though perhaps not by all.

A further topical dimension of the film was the depiction of Mainland refugees in Hong Kong and of the partisans, who waged guerilla war against the Japanese throughout the occupation from their base in the New Territories. As Snow points out in The Fall of Hong Kong – Britain China and the Japanese Occupation, the East River guerillas who liaised with British officers and aided and in many ways spearheaded the resistance, were communists. This did not stop British forces cooperating with and even training the guerillas, which helped to establish an understanding that things would change after the Japanese Occupation. Of course the race to take possession of Hong Kong after the surrender of the Japanese government in August 1945 and the struggles between Nationalists and Communists, British and Americans to preside over the official surrender of Hong Kong by the Japanese, as Snow argues, prefigures the intense negotiations and exertion of political influence leading up to its eventual handover in 1997. Snow’s thesis is that the Japanese occupation signaled the beginning of the end of British Hong Kong, so that the idea of Fall can be extended to refer to the Territory’s eventual repossession by the Mainland Chinese. Referring to the 1997 ‘take-over’ he writes:

A beaming President Jiang Zemin proclaimed the return to the Motherland of the long-lost enclave, and troops of the new People’s Liberation Army garrison crossed the border…The last ghostly vestiges of British domination had been laid to rest. But the fact was that the real extinction of British supremacy in Hong Kong took place not on that evening, but on another one half a century earlier when Lieutenant-General Sakai received the surrender of Sir Mark Young in the blazing candlelight of the Peninsula Hotel.(Snow, 348)

To underline this parallel relation, Snow concludes his book with the following sub-heading: ‘Another takeover – China recovers possession’. That the outpost was effectively doomed to fall to Japan and subsequently to be reabsorbed into China was according to Snow’s analysis a forgone conclusion, notwithstanding Governor Young’s and latterly Governor Patten’s efforts to improve the prospects.

Both Love in a Fallen City and Hong Kong 1941 depict a decaying and racist British colonial presence in Hong Kong, bereft of moral authority to govern, and in both the wish is expressed that the sooner the Japanese arrive and impose authority the better. Nam’s father, Mr Ha (played by the veteran actor Shih Kien) is representative of the collaborators among the merchant class. Their business pragmatism persuaded them to collaborate with the British colonizers, the Japanese occupiers who established their rule under the aegis of their so-called Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and from the 1980s onwards with Beijing. The tycoons are clearly represented in both films as venal and cynical in their shifts of allegiance, a phenomenon that was already becoming evident in the 1980s in Hong Kong. As Philip Snow points out in his study, these Chinese and overseas Chinese ‘gentry’, despite gaining wealth, honours and a significant hand in shaping Hong Kong society, shifted their allegiance with alarming alacrity between the British, the Japanese, the British again – and from the 1980s onwards the Beijing government. Of course neither director spells this out but the sub-text of both films invited its 1984 viewers to draw their own conclusions.

4. Conclusion

So to what extent can we assert with certainty that the two films are intended as allegories? By its very nature allegory cannot be conclusively identified in novels, plays or films, being implicit rather than explicit in its patterns of signification. Consequently it is desirable to cite corroborating views expressing similar readings of the work’s referential scope. Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong Culture and the Politics of Disappearance and Leung Ping-kwan in a recent essay on Hong Kong urban cinema and cultural identity have both argued cogently for more polyvalent readings of notable Hong Kong films in the context of the city’s ongoing process of identity formation. Another important study of Hong Kong cinema, Lisa Odham Stokes’ and Michael Hoover’s City on Fire – Hong Kong Cinema, refers to Hong Kong 1941 as a film that exemplifies regional historical sagas which double as ‘scenarios for Hong Kong’s future, while avoiding direct reference to politics…and avoiding censure by the Censor Board.’ (1999: 184-5). Such a plausible explanation why reviewers would either not see or not talk about implicit secondary meanings and subtexts, the so-called ‘box-office poison argument’, argues the need for retrospective reassessment of these films’ range of signification. The fact that Film Bi-weekly, Hong Kong’s Chinese-language cinema magazine during that period made no mention in its reviews of allegorical or topical dimensions in either film suggests that Odham Stokes’ and Hoover’s conjecture is close to the mark. By contrast, Stephen Teo, in his comprehensive study, Hong Kong Cinema – the Extra Dimensions, while considering the view that Love in a Fallen City is ‘an allegory linking the conquest of Hong Kong in 1941 to the impending takeover of the territory by the Chinese in 1997,’ is not entirely convinced of its allegorical effectiveness. Rather bizarrely he opines that ‘Hui’s film is too unemotional a romantic saga for the allegory to work’ (1997: 211). Focusing more on the family drama generic aspects of the film, he nonetheless presents the idea of allegory even if he fails to explore it.

More recently Queensland Art Gallery in its 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art of 2006 included Love in a Fallen City in its cinematic programme featuring films based on Eileen Chang’s stories and screenplays. The catalogue synopsis of the film makes it clear that an allegorical interpretation of Hui’s film enriches its potential range of meanings, and accords very much with the reading offered above:

Based on Eileen Chang’s novella set in the period leading up to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, Love in a Fallen City was seen on its release as director Ann Hui’s response to the uncertainty of living in a city about to undergo another epoch-making change in its political order. Made at a time when public debate in Hong Kong was increasingly dominated by the 1997 handover to China, the film is about the city’s relationship with Shanghai and about its transfer between imperial powers when the English ceded control to Japanese forces.

Referring to Po Chieh-leong’s Hong Kong 1941, among other films such as Tsui Hark‘s Shanghai Blues, Ann Hui’s Boat People and John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, in his sociology course notes for 2007-8 at the University of Hong Kong, Dr Travis S. K. Kong saw a strong case for considering early 80’s Hong Kong films as allegories of anxiety:

They touched upon sensitive issues such as Hong Kong’s colonial history or the general anxiety of Hong Kong people under the intractable problem of 1997. They put some of the anxiety and uncertainty in films with strong political allegories.

Any hermeneutic parallels we may draw between the Japanese invasion and occupation of 1941-5 and the retrocession of sovereignty in 1997 do not of course preclude a reading of both films as reflections on historical discourses on the fall and occupation of Hong Kong and on Eileen Chang’s close emotional connection with the pre-war city. Likewise, the construction of heroic masculinity in the person of Chow Yun-fat facilitates a positivist retrospective as much as an assertive Hong Kong identity in the face of coming changes. However, not to perceive a more dichotomous past/future subtext in these films is to under-estimate their signifying intentions. As I have argued above, topicality and synchronicity are definitely significant factors in assessing the relevance of a film’s or a stage drama’s ephemeral frame of topical reference. We should, of course, bear in mind that, unlike strict literary categories of allegory, such as those of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the more nebulous qualities of filmic allegory may not be essential to constructions of narrative meaning for the average viewer of films such as Love in a Fallen City and Hong Kong 1941. However to the historian, film scholar or enthusiast of historical film such an allegorical interpretation opens up its hermeneutic possibilities. This process greatly enriches our appreciation of the film’s frame of reference, as well as deepening our insight into its motivation and the contemporary social and political resonances the director wishes to evoke.

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Lim, Bliss Cua. Spectral Times: The Ghost Film As Historical Allegory. Positions: East Asia cultures critique – Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2001, pp. 287-329. Duke University Press.
Odham Stokes, Lisa and Michael Hoover. 1999. City on Fire – Hong Kong Cinema. London & New York: Verso.
Pang, Laikwan. “Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: utilitarianism and (translocal)” in Postcolonial Studies, Volume 10, Issue 4, December 2007, pp. 413-430.
Snow, Philip. 2003. The Fall of Hong Kong – Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Teo, Stephen. 1997. Hong Kong Cinema – The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute.
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Websites
http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/hong_kong,_shanghai_cinema_cities/eileen_chang
http://www.sogoodreviews.com/reviews/loveinafallencity.htm
http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews/hong_kong_1941.htm

Created on: Sunday, 29 March 2009