Meanwhile, Pat Neil schemes to perform in her father’s company despite the ancient tradition that all female roles are played by males. Tsao Wan has joined a guerrilla movement whose immediate goal is to get its hands on a document revealing that the military Establishment, backed by foreign loans, intends to restore the monarchy to power and thus curtail the democratic movement. Second is the improbably named Pat Neil (Sally Yeh), daughter of the proprietor of a Peking opera company, and the third is Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), a singer who has gotten her hands on a fortune in jewelry from a fleeing general’s household only to lose it all. She even gets away with wearing military uniforms, doubtlessly on account of her powerful doting father (Wu Ma). First is a general’s daughter, Tsao Wan (Brigitte Lin), who studied gynecology abroad and who wears Western-style men’s attire, a la George Sand, not to disguise her sex but to enable her to move about more freely. Three beautiful, high-spirited young women of very different backgrounds but similar cravings for liberation cross paths and find common cause. The time is 1911, in the chaotic wake of China’s first democratic revolution.
It’s also surprisingly poignant and bursting with a witty feminist spirit. It’s a giddy period comedy, loaded with action and more slamming doors and hit-and-miss encounters than a Feydeau farce.
Tsui Hark’s 1986 “Peking Opera Blues” (at the Monica 4-Plex), one of the most celebrated Hong Kong movies of the past decade, has surfaced at local festivals and film series, but only now is having a regular run at a theater outside Chinatown.
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