Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Comrades, Almost a Love Story
1996 · Peter Chan Ho-Sun · Comrades, Almost a Love Story on Sightlines
A folding table at a Chinese New Year night market. Two young mainlanders, a stack of Teresa Teng cassettes, a holiday crowd in a buying mood. Teng is the best-loved voice in the Chinese-speaking world. The cassettes don't sell.
Nobody explains why, and nobody has to. In the Hong Kong of the late 1980s, buying a Teresa Teng tape at a public stall is a little like telling the stranger next to you where your family came from. The people walking past would rather not be seen remembering. The flop also tells Qiao and Jun something they have been hiding from everyone, each other included: they are the same kind of person. Both are outsiders, and both are acting out a belonging in a city that doesn't quite want them.
Peter Chan's film is full of moments like this. They're worth slowing down for, because they show how the film thinks. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, divided the classical story film into two shapes. In the large form, a situation presses on a hero until he does something decisive and changes it, as in a western showdown. The small form runs the other way: a minor act, often a trivial one, reveals a situation we couldn't see. Deleuze's model was Lubitsch, where a glance or a closing door gives away a whole hidden arrangement. The night market is the small form in its pure state. Two people try to make a little money, and the failed sale lays bare the shape of their lives.
Why does this help us watch? Because Comrades looks like a film about action, and it is crowded with it. Jun, an earnest boy from the north, works and saves to bring over the fiancée he left at home. Qiao, a Guangzhou transplant passing as a native Hong Konger, chases money with a hunger that never lets up. The city around them runs on English classes, the pirated-record trade, ATMs, stock tickers and pagers. Everyone is busy doing something. The film's quiet discovery is that none of this effort reaches the thing they want. The money comes and goes. The love is there almost from the start. Every act aims at one thing and reveals another.
Deleuze's second idea applies here. He argued that postwar cinema went through a crisis of the action-image, which he defined as the moment when characters can no longer answer what they see with an act that fits it. Comrades is no modernist puzzle. It is a melodrama, unashamedly, and it lives right at the edge of that crisis. As Chan and screenwriter Ivy Ho build them, the obstacles are not villains to be beaten. They are money, pride, old promises and self-deception. You can't shoot those or outrun them. So the lovers keep acting sensibly, and keep heading in the wrong direction.
Then Ho and Chan add time. The film covers about ten years in a string of chance meetings and partings. The cutting jumps ahead without warning, puts the two in the same frame or the same city, and then pulls them apart again. Deleuze called this loosening of cause and effect weak links: scenes joined by chance and gap more than by consequence. In most melodramas, fate drives the plot from outside. Here the ellipses do fate's work, and they do it quietly. We don't watch the years pass. We see what they leave behind.
Mostly we see it on faces. Jingle Ma's warm, unshowy camera tends to hold on the actors and trust them. Deleuze called the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face but not yet turned into action. He also distinguished two kinds of face. One is the steady face, still and reflecting a single quality, like wonder. The other is the intensive face, where small movements build toward a threshold. The film pairs these two kinds of face in a single frame. Leon Lai, a Cantopop idol sometimes faulted for stiffness, turns that reserve into Jun's constancy: a decent, slow-to-understand face that only reflects. Maggie Cheung's Qiao is the intensive face, armored in ambition, and her tenderness keeps breaking through against her will. Watch her when she thinks no one is looking at her. That's where the film keeps its feelings.
And listen. Teng's recordings run through the film as connective tissue, with Chiu Tsang-Hei's score kept underneath them. Deleuze had a term, the mark, for an object whose meaning comes from the chain of habit it belongs to. Teng's voice is a mark: hear it and you know where someone grew up. Chan returns his props with a novelist's care, Teng's music, the bicycle and Pao's Mickey Mouse tattoo among them, so that each return carries an earlier scene with it. The original title, Tian Mi Mi, comes from a Teng song and means "sweet as honey." Against the film's hard economic reality it works as both a wish and an irony.
In an industry then dominated by action spectacle, Triad sagas and slapstick, this was a gamble. Chan's UFO collective made a mid-budget adult drama with no action hook and an elliptical, downbeat structure. It swept the Hong Kong Film Awards, and the bet that grown-up drama still had an audience paid off. What it did to narrative was precise. It made the missed connection the structure of the whole film instead of one obstacle along the way, and it located the obstacle inside economics and character.
The film knows its ancestors. From Spring in a Small Town it takes the old Chinese grammar of longing carried by the withheld glance and the economical gesture. An Autumn's Tale supplied the template of immigrant lovers kept apart by the economics of survival. Rouge had shown that period pop songs could serve as an engine of feeling and nostalgia inside the story. Days of Being Wild built romance out of elliptical time jumps and period songs around a minimal Maggie Cheung. Song of the Exile rested an émigré drama on Cheung's naturalistic interior life. Full Moon in New York brought a clear-eyed, documentary-style attention to diaspora life. Comrades gathers these into one chapter and turns them toward the handover decade's question of who belongs where. It asks that question through a love story, without a single speech.
So when you watch, look at what each act reveals rather than what it achieves. Notice when Teng's voice comes in and who flinches. And keep one question open: what does belonging mean when the only person who knows who you really are is the one you keep missing?
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — The Teresa Teng cassette stall at the Chinese New Year night market: a minor money-making act whose failure, conveyed purely through staging, reveals that both characters are mainland outsiders hiding their roots
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Constant striving (saving, English classes, the record trade, ATMs and stock tickers) never reaches the love; the obstacles are internal and material (money, pride, prior commitments, self-deception) rather than adversaries an act could defeat
- weak-links — Editing that compresses about ten years into chance meetings and partings, with time jumps that bring the pair into the same frame or city and then separate them
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Jingle Ma's camera holds on faces: Leon Lai's reserve becomes Jun's steady, reflecting constancy, while Maggie Cheung's Qiao is an intensive face whose tenderness breaks through her armor of ambition against her will
- mark — Teresa Teng's recordings as the shared inheritance that marks the pair as mainlanders, and the recurring props (bicycle, Teng's music, Pao's Mickey Mouse tattoo) that bring earlier scenes back each time they return