{"id":41992,"date":"2026-04-05T21:04:41","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=41992"},"modified":"2026-04-05T21:04:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T13:04:41","slug":"how-did-ann-hui-bring-eileen-changs-love-in-a-fallen-city-and-eighteen-springs-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=41992","title":{"rendered":"How did Ann Hui bring Eileen Chang\u2019s Love in a Fallen City and Eighteen Springs to life?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Celebrated novelist Eileen Chang Ai-ling was not only a film fan, but she also worked as a film critic and wrote movie scripts. Chang\u2019s own novellas were often considered difficult to adapt for the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer stories are beautiful because of their language and details, not their plots,\u201d critic Paul Fonoroff wrote in the South China Morning Post.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the great Hong Kong director Ann Hui On-wah<\/span> has tried three times, with Love in a Fallen City<\/em> (1984), Eighteen Springs<\/em> (1997) and Love After Love<\/em><\/span> (2020). Here, we take a look at her first two Chang adaptations.<\/div>\n

Love in a Fallen City (1984)<\/h3>\n
This beautifully wrought version of Chang\u2019s 1943 novella features Chow Yun-fat<\/span> as a playboy and Cora Miao Chien-jen as the demure Shanghainese woman he falls in love with.<\/div>\n
Hui constantly sought to experiment during her early career \u2013 later helming the martial arts epic The Romance of Book and Sword<\/em><\/span>, for instance \u2013 and this adaptation marks a significant departure in visual style from her preceding films, including The Secret<\/em><\/span> and the acclaimed Boat People<\/em><\/span>.<\/div>\n

Hui tends to adapt her directorial approach to the needs of the script. Love in a Fallen City<\/em> relies on wide shots, slow pans and a consistently genteel approach to depict the upper echelons of life in Shanghai, achieving a careful sophistication rare for 1980s Hong Kong cinema.<\/p>\n

This is perfectly captured in a garden party scene where Hui\u2019s smoothly sweeping camera eavesdrops on wealthy guests, mimicking Luchino Visconti\u2019s The Leopard<\/em> on a smaller scale.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Celebrated novelist Eileen Chang Ai-ling was not only a film fan, but she also worked as a film critic and wrote movie scripts. Chang\u2019s own…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[10479,2751,19764,540,19765,11539,1806,303,402,772,11503],"class_list":["post-41992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-ann","tag-bring","tag-changs","tag-city","tag-eighteen","tag-eileen","tag-fallen","tag-hui","tag-life","tag-love","tag-springs","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}