A flood of Chinese stars in cheongsam

"CRIEnglish" has an article that is a joy to those stuck in the snowy wastes of the crumbling wreck of North America's former industrial heartland. A perfect timeless or evergreen feature piece, on that could run almost anytime, it is little more than scores of pictures of actresses, singers and models, most of them Chinese, wearing variations of the cheongsam.

I have only a few quibbles with the editors at CRIEnglish. The first is their count on the number of different versions of the cheongsam that Maggie Cheung wears in "In the Mood for Love". The article states that it is 23 while I counted 32 different ones. Their source may be better than mine (I might have simply counted a few twice) but I will stick with the larger number for now.

Another is that they showed some dresses that could only be seen as a cheongsam if someone decided they were. This was probably due to them wanting to run as many pictures as possible, a decision with which I fully agree. Frederick Engels was correct when he wrote that quantity becomes quality (or the more, the better) so we can put with a few instances of red mini-dresses with capped sleeves stuck in among the flood of pictures of the real thing.

Interesting contrast showing how close to perfect this garment can be and why is has been so popular for so long--Celine Dion wearing what looks to be exactly the same dress as Gong Li (what, her again?) with both of them looking perfectly smashing.

Here is Celine Dion at some red carpet event with Jennifer Lopez in a slip dress. Dion's gown accents her willowy figure and essentially keeps her from disappearing while next to the more abundant (and more abundantly displayed) assets of Jennifer Lopez:

Someone should have told Jennifer to lose that green belt/sash/whatever with the huge fabric flower but that is another story.

Similar poses in the same dress--note the piping on the sleeve holes, for example--Celine Dion and Gong Li:

 

I won't bother with any more images--CRI has a truckload of them.

A quick update since durian dave mentioned the picture of Cecilia Cheung--I agree it is a lovely image--and it is a bit buried at CRI, this is it:

Cecilia Cheung

Cecilia Cheung was one of the young women caught in the debacle last year when pornographic photos of Cecilia, Ah Gil and a few others, taken by Edison Chen and stored on his laptop, were found by a repair tech in Hong Kong and posted on the web last year. Within a few hours they were everywhere and the actresses have had a very tough year, especially Ah Gil, who as Gillian Chung of the Twins, had a squeaky clean, girl next door image. Cecilia Cheung has suffered from the fallout as well, with her career on hold although her family and her in-laws have been very supportive of her. Cecilia gave an interview recently--the best short discussion of the entire tawdry affair is by Valerie Soe in her blog beyondasiaphilia.

Cecilia Cheung had a charmed film career until theses photos were released. In her first movie, "Fly me to Polaris", she had a role that almost any actress would love to do and Cecilia squeezed every drop of pathos from it. Some of the most jaundiced reviewers at the Hong Kong Movie Database confessed to shedding a tear while watching the unabashed weeper.

"One Nite in Mongkok" was a real departure--she plays a young mainland woman who comes to Hong Kong for three weeks every couple of months to work as a prostitute in order to keep her family out of poverty. She plays who Dan Dan is a hooker without a heart of gold. She tries to keep an upbeat attitude and has a realistic, if not enthusiastic, view of her profession. She hates what she does but is from a very poor village and is one of fourteen in her family. Making $8,000 in three weeks at $130 a trick—her cut after the pimp and room are paid for—she obviously pays very dearly for her family loyalty. One of the few upbeat moments in the film comes at the very end when the audience realizes that Dan Dan really won’t be returning to Hong Kong—or if so, at not as a Mongkok prostitute. We see her in a confrontation with her pimp Walter, played by a memorably thuggish Chan Mong-Wa. She is finished for the day, has done her quota of tricks, knows how much she needs to make and how much she has made and just wants to leave. Neither she nor the audience is surprised when Walter starts slapping her around—this is just part of the cost of doing business and and part of the degredation she has to suffer in order to help her family--it is heartbreaking. Dan Dan is a very luridly written role and Cecilia and comes across very well as a person who is being pulled in several directions at the same time.

Two pictures from "One Nite in Monkok":



Incandescent as the Princess in "The Promise" Cecilia's beauty, which could be a distraction in grittier roles, served her very well here. Even though the Princess was a spirit, a human being and, possibly, a hallucination her portrayal was perfect, switching from one aspect to another and running the scales from imperious to heartbroken, to both desperate and hopeful this last when she was locked up in an iron birdcage prison. "The Promise" had a big budget with an international all star cast directed by Chen Kaige and was the entered in the Oscar sweepstakes by the People's Republic. Cecilia was exceptional even as part of this formidable group.

Pictures from "The Promise":