
The 1986 Hong Kong film
Peking Opera Blues (刀馬旦) will play in Pittsburgh from September 28 through Octoer 6, part of a Hong Kong Cinema Classics series at the Harris Theater featuring 11 Hong Kong films from the 1980s and 1990s.
Perhaps no other film better displays the blink-and-you-miss-it inventiveness of Tsui Hark than Peking Opera Blues. It isn’t just one of the greatest Hong Kong action movies of all time, or merely an exquisite combination of political history and gender-defying performance. Tsui’s enthralling balance of tone, editing patterns, and comedic role-playing means the film is all of these things at warp speed, a dazzling expression of genre multiplicity that shifts between modes moment to moment. This flexibility extends to the cast: three women (Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh, and Cherie Chung), a spy, an actor, and a musician, are assuming roles to survive the violent end of the Qing Dynasty, aligning themselves with warlords, revolutionaries, seducers, and friends. Each identity opens up traps, expectations, and freedoms. Whether on the stage or in a melee, this is a film that plays out under a ruthless and overwhelming urge to execute the perfect stunt—both for laughs and for something deadly serious.
Tickets are available online.
Two other Hong Kong films play there this weekend as part of the series:
A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色) from the 27th, and
A Better Tomorrow 2 (英雄本色2) one day only on the 28th. These, and the other films to comprise the Hong Kong Classics series, play at the Harris Theater in downtown's Cultural District (
map).