It’s impossible not to be carried along by the delirious rush of silliness in this knockabout screwball comedy from 1984, directed by Hong Kong genre veteran Tsui Hark and restored last year for its 40th anniversary. It’s a tale of love and mistaken identity, with plenty of farcical hiding in cupboards to avoid the scandal of being caught in a compromising position, and we even get the time-honoured business of having sex with the wrong person in pitch darkness – a plot point stretching back to Jacobean drama.
It’s a wacky love triangle. In 1937 Shanghai, with the Japanese about to invade, a young would-be songwriter nicknamed Do-Re-Mi (Kenny Bee) is humiliatingly employed as a clown in a nightclub and figures he might as well join the army. In the chaos caused by the appearance of Japanese fighter planes, he meets-cute under Suzhou Bridge with delicate, vulnerable Shu-Shu (played by Sylvia Chang, who recently appeared in Jia Zhang-ke’s Mountains May Depart and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night).
