Shanghai in Cubao

SINGKIT

- DOREEN G. YU

I recently spent an afternoon in old Shanghai, the glamour and the squalor of that fabled Paris of the East captured in two landmark films – the 1932 Shanghai Express and the 2007 Lust, Caution.

Both films are set during turbulent times in China – Shanghai Express during the civil war and Lust, Caution during the Japanese occupation. The films are based on a story and a novella which were, in turn, loosely based on historical events (the seizing of the Blue Express train in Shandong province in 1923 and the attempted assassination by a Chinese woman of a Japanese collaborator in 1940).

Lust, Caution – directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi among other outstanding films) which won the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Film Festival and the 2008 BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film – runs for two-and-a-half hours and is set in Hong Kong and Shanghai, with some scenes filmed in the old houses in Penang, Malaysia. Shanghai Express is, as its title suggests, set on board a train from Beijing (Peking at the time) to Shanghai. In both films, a rape triggers a series of events that leads to a fatal – although vastly different – conclusion.

The main stars of Shanghai Express are Caucasians, except for Anna May Wong as the exotic inscrutable Chinese, but she does play a pivotal role. Chinese actors are used as mere extras – train passengers, soldiers, coolies.