Synopsis
In this dreamy romance set in China during the fourth-century, a young woman convinces her parents to allow her to dress as a boy and attend university.
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The Love Eterne
Cast
Betty Loh Ti Ivy Ling Po Yam Kit Li Kun Chen Yan-yan Ching Miao Kao Pao-shu Ou-Yang Sha-Fei Yang Chi-Ching Chiang Kuang-Chao Julie Shih Yen Li Hsiang-Chun Ding Ling Kong Hung Lily Mo Chou Huang Man Kiu Chong Lee Ting Guan Shan John Law Ma Carrie Ku Mei Wong Chung Violet Pan Ying-Zi Ha Yee-Chau Chu Mu Cheung Lai-Chu Chin Han Lan Wei-Lieh Ku Feng Show All…
Director
Producer
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Art Direction
Composer
Sound
Costume Design
Makeup
Studio
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
Liang Shan Bo yu Zhu Ying Tai, 梁山伯与祝英台, Лян Шаньбо та Чжу Інтай, Lương Sơn Bá – Chúc Anh Đài
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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Hong Kong
Releases by Country
Hong Kong
03 Apr 1963
- Theatrical
Popular reviews
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Ripe with endless queer readings due to how the nature of its casting is inextricably tied with the facilities of gender within its narrative as well as both confronting patriarchal systems with graceful bluntness and subverting them with playful guile, it's little wonder how The Love Eterne gained traction on letterboxd. But that would diminish the wonder of the gorgeous backdrops, the painterly framing, the gliding camerawork, and the Huangmei operatics, components of the excellent Shaw Brothers production that make this a joy to experience.
Notable are the ways in which the narrative repeatedly sets up so many moments early in to pay off in spades later on, an adroit Yingtai who excels in talents both 'womanly' and 'manly' constantly…
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🎵Girls who are boys🎵
🎵Who like boys to be girls🎵
🎵Who do boys like they're girls🎵
🎵Who do girls like they're boys🎵
🎵Always should be someone you really looooove🎵*Shaw Brothers’ The Love Eterne is a historical drama/opera that uses the same Chinese legend (The Butterfly Lovers) as its source material as Tsui Hark's The Lovers.
Despite me being a gigantic fan of Tsui's brand of entertainment, I think this is the better movie. It's just more lovely and magical. Director Li Han-Hsiang, cinematographer Tadashi Nishimoto and art director Tsao Nien-Lung are all at the top of their game here.
Casting female actors in both the male and the female role was an inspired choice and kind of progressive? It…
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"How can two men marry?"
At long last I secured myself a copy of Li Han-Hsiang's gender-bending masterpiece, after complaining for years about not having access to it. It arrived as a gift, just in time to become the perfect birthday watch.
Queer in about 14 different ways, this beloved and influential Huangmei opera won awards and acclaim all over Southeast Asia, including the Golden Horse. Some people went to see the film hundreds of times, and co-star Ivy Ling Po was mobbed by hundreds of thousands of fans on a press tour in Taiwan.
I'm sure I had read a summary of the plot at some point but I really was not prepared for the mind-bending amounts of queerness… -
Shaw Brothers musical adaptation of the Butterfly Lovers story (also done as a non-musical by Tsui Hark in 1994), where the heroine disguises herself as a boy to go to school and falls in love with a fellow student who doesn't know her true gender. After several years, the truth is revealed but they're still kept apart by the girl being forced into an arranged marriage. Death and transfiguration ensue.
The gender relations are further complicated with a meta-twist wherein both leading roles are played by women (one playing a woman pretending to be a man, the other simply a woman pretending to be a man, both actresses (Betty Loh Ti and Ivy Ling Po, respectively) are terrific. Director Li…
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Operatic and mythical in the manner in which it weaves a tapestry of surreal artifice. The gender masquerade, the vivid color schemes, and the majestic sets are all captured in graceful widescreen compositions. The climax is especially powerful. It is, perhaps, the most ecstatic and subversive of storytelling - apocalyptic in its depiction yet affirmative in its representation. If cinema is imbued with religious reverence, then it is befitting for the film to embalm the lovers in their spiritual form. The final image is, at once, transcendental, radical, compassionate, romantic, yet most importantly, eternal.
My kind of Asian Baby Girl/Gangster cinema 🥰
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A movie for all the fellas out there who've asked themselves if they'd marry their homies if they were girls. Except you're both girls.
Let me live in a Shaw Brothers set.
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I don't really know what to say, I don't yet have the language to describe what this did to me. All I can say is that I was overcome with emotion for most of the runtime--this is one of the few films I've seen that is better than a dream. A completely novel experience for me. I think I will have to learn Mandarin so I can sing every song in here. This is the cinema of my soul.
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Been a while since I've seen this one, the movie that I uphold as the best film the Shaw Brothers ever made, and upon rewatch I realized that I was a fool.
A fool to get worried that I had rose-tinted glasses because this was as brilliant as I remembered it. Love Eterne carries a deft and technically honed tone that the studio has not matched before or since. The entire craftsmanship of the thing is like, two tiers above the usual Shaw fare, and while that does show off some truly impressive set design and cinematography, more importantly it is able to produce characters that you genuinely care for, and in turn able to actually express and convey emotion,…
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"Flowers bloom under rainbow bridge
Butterflies flutter in pairs
Time goes by, but their love won't die
That's Liang Shan-bo and Zhu Ying-tai"The quintessential Huangmei opera film, released during the genre's golden age. Though it wasn't my first introduction to the genre, as that honor went to The Female Prince (1966), this was among those that left the strongest impression on me.
Since I first watched it, I found the song 回十八之一 on Spotify, the one where Shan-bo travelled back to Ying-tai's home after discovering her real identity. I listened to it so much that it became engrained in my memory. During this rewatch, I couldn't help but sing along to it when the scene played out. In that…
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The Love Eterne is a Huangmei Opera adaptation of the Butterfly Lovers, a classic Chinese folktale. It tells the tale of a young scholar, Liang Shanbo, (Ivy Ling Po) who falls for a fellow student, Zhu Yingtai, who's actually a girl pretending to be a boy (and played by Betty Loh Ti) so that she can go to school.
Although the folktale has been adapted countless of times, The Love Eterne is still considered the best film adaptation of the story.
Shaw Brothers entrusted Li Han-Hsiang to direct as he had earlier successes with his previous Huangmei opera films and he does a masterful job. The way the camera moves, the combination of music and image, the production design are…
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Like all the greatest musicals, this operates on a fine balance between artifice and emotion; this just happens to foreground it, elevating its queerness to text and giving its affection to the outsiders: women, the poor, the servants. In its commitment to subverting tradition, it feels like a revolution.