The Love Eterne 1963 Li Han Hsiang

Here it is.  One of the most famous Chinese movies of all time.  Voted as one of the top 100 Chinese movies of the last century.  And it's a musical.  A cross-dressing musical.  And it's awesome.  Betty Loh Ti plays a young girl named Zhu Ying Tai.  What she wants more than anything is to go to school and get her learn on.  Her father is against it, because boys are bad, and girls should stay home.  Like any self respecting teenage girl Ying Tai locks herself in her room and refuses to eat until she gets her way.

Faster than you can say Yentl, she's off to school dressed as a boy with her maid in tow, also all boyed up.  On the road there, Ying Tai meets Liang Shan Bo, played by Ivy Ling Po.  With a name like Ivy, she's gotta be a girl.  She is, just not in this movie.  In real life, Betty Lo Ti and Ivy Ling Po are both women, but in this movie Betty Lo Ti is playing a girl dressing up as a boy, and Ivy Ling Po is just playing a boy.  In fact, this is the movie that made Ivy Ling Po a star, and as such she continued to play male parts in a lot of these movies.

So Ying Tai and Shan Bo become friends and stay at school for 3 years, during which time Shan Bo never figures it out, and Ying Tai becomes more and more attracted to him.  So it's really just a Chinese opera version of Just One of the Guys, except this time the girl wants to profess her love to the boy who's really a girl in real life, just not here.  So it's really a Chinese opera version of a lesbian love story...sort of.  Being an opera, it does have to get tragic, but I can't really give it all away here.  Just let me say that if you liked The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (and if you didn't, get the hell out of here you heartless bastard!) or Romeo & Juliet, or even gay marriage in general, you should check this out.  Mostly singing, no dancing, and lots of ladies looking longingly at other ladies make this a pretty fantastic movie.

This movie has never been released on DVD in America (shocker!), but if you have an all-region DVD player, you can find the Hong Kong release pretty easily.  It comes with a second disc of special features including a look back at the film  with Cheng Pei Pei from Come Drink With Me, where she talks to Ivy Ling Po about how the movie changed her life.  There's also an Ivy Ling Po music video, with clips from some of the Huangmei Opera movies she was in, as well as a short documentary about the director of the movie, and a documentary on the history of Huangmei Opera.  This movie won loads of awards at the Golden Horse Film Awards (Taiwan's equivalent of the Oscars), so this DVD is fairly loaded.  The Blu-Ray was just released as well, so if you have an all-region Blu Ray player, you should definitely pick this up.