The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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THE LOVE ETERNE (aka LIANG SHAN-PO AND CHU YING-TAI) is a 1963 Hong Kong operetta based on the oft-filmed classic story, "Liang Shan-Po And Chu Ying-Tai," aka "The Butterfly Lovers." It offers sumptuous color filming on lavish Shaw Bros. studio sets and tells its love story in a combination of dialogue and song, focusing on a pair of students at a university in Hangchow, one, Chu Ying-Tai, a female disguised as a man in order to gain entry into the school and the other an older fellow student, Liang Shan-Po.

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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Ying-Tai falls in love with Shan-Po and, when she has to leave school after three years, tries to drop hints in song that she's really a female as the clueless boy accompanies her part of the way on her memorable trip home. Eventually, he gets the picture but by then her family has already promised her to someone else, setting the stage for a tear-jerking finale. This is the film that Ang Lee, director of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, chose to watch with reporter Rick Lyman when he was the subject of an installment of the "Watching Movies" series in The New York Times (March 9, 2001).

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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The stars of the 127-minute film are Le Di (touted in the DVD cast notes as Hong Kong cinema's "one and only 'Classical Beauty'") in the role of Chu Ying-Tai and Ivy Ling Po (aka Ling Bo), one of Shaw Brothers' top female stars of the time, in the male role of Shan-Po. They're both quite captivating, whether in the straight dramatic and comic interactions of the spoken dialogue or the operetta-style singing to each other in the more intimate scenes. The camera is usually focused on the two lead performers so the success of the film depends greatly on their expertise in conveying believably the strong emotions of the intense love story, particularly in the latter stage of the film where Ying-Tai's family has effectively blocked the young pair's budding romance. Ling Po's turn as a heartbroken young man in the throes of an emotional breakdown is quite wrenching and most convincing.

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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Ivy Ling Po often played young men in Chinese Opera-based Shaw Bros. films of the era, most notably THE GRAND SUBSTITUTION (1965), a tale of court politics and family loyalty in Old China. The actress can also be seen as a female swordswoman in TWIN SWORDS (1965), starring Jimmy Wang Yu. Both films are also reviewed on this site.

The songs in LOVE ETERNE are quite pleasing and the orchestrations, making use of traditional instruments, quite evocative of Chinese Opera. The score does not use the famed "Butterfly Lovers" violin concerto, which figures prominently in a later film version of the same story, THE LOVERS (1994), directed by Tsui Hark and starring Nicky Wu (a male actor) as Liang Shan Po and Charlie Young (an actress) as Chu Ying-Tai. The characters don't sing in Hark's film, leaving the scriptwriters more time to pack the film with plot and incident and make it much more intense. They tell the same story but they're two different kinds of films, with the older one drawing more explicitly on Chinese theatrical traditions while the newer film is a little punchier and designed to spruce up the tale for modern youth appeal.

IMDB Reviewer

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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The Love Eterne is two hours of solid entertainment. The delightful staging and playful songs never hint that it was actually a rush-job - the film had to beat a competing production of the same story to the cinemas. The songs are terrific. There's a song for all occasions; a tune for friendship, a song for medicinal remedies, and even one to alternately justify and debunk sexist texts. Worth noting is that King Hu (director of Come Drink With Me, Dragon Inn, The Fate of Lee Khan) was also involved as associate director doing the "action scenes" while Li Hanxiang did the "romantic scenes"*. Also of interest is that the cinematographer is He Lanshan (Tadashi Nishimoto), who also shot the spectacular Come Drink With Me three years later.

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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The DVD5 features:
- Shaw Showcase : The Love Eterne (19 minutes documentary hosted by none other than Cheng Pei Pei, interviewing Ivy Ling Po herself);
- Ivy Ling Po music video;
- The Savant : Lee Han Hsiang (15 minutes documentary featuring interview bits with the master);
- The Huangmeixi Romances : Scroll I (17 minutes; first part in a series of documentaries about Huangmei opera, offering insight about its roots and the resulting genre films - the remaining parts can be found scattered in other Shaw Huangmeixi releases);
- And the usual stills/poster/mini-biography parafernalia you can find in most Shaw Brothers IVL releases.

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The Love Eterne (1963) [Remastered]

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