The Postmodern Life of My Aunt

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Movie: The Postmodern Life of My Aunt
Chinese: 姨妈的后现代生活
Director: Ann Hui
Writer: Ann Hui, Qiang Li, Yanyan
Producer:
Cinematography:
Release Date: September 8, 2006
Runtime: 111 min
Language: Cantonese
Country: Hong Kong

Plot

A twelve-year-old boy Kuankuan visits his aunt (Sequin Gowa) who is living alone after her retirement in Shanghai. Through his eyes his aunt appears stingy, out-of-date, loud, and ridiculous. Her neighbor (Lu Yan) also appears bizarre. But after a series of adventures together they have reached some understanding before he leaves for home.. Kuankuan, however, is only a series of colorful characters his aunt meets in her modern odyssey in a rapidly changing metropolis. They are at once prototypes in the modern city in China as well as perennial prototypes: the misfit, the dilettante, and the underdog. One morning in the park our aunt meets Pan (Chow Yun Fat), a mysterious, fatally attractive aging dilettante. She falls for him and has an affair with him. Finally he runs away after cheating her of her life savings. Crisscrossing this affair is another story with a peasant woman (Shike) who has come to work in the big city. She has a four-year old daughter very ill in hospital. To help, the aunt hires her as her domestic help. But one day she finds out that the woman tries to find extra income by pretending to be knocked down by a car to exhort money. These and other incidents, plus an accident that puts her in hospital makes the aunt so disillusioned that she decides to leave Shanghai, which has been her home for over twenty years, to return to her estranged husband and daughter (Zhaowei) in the provinces. A year later Kuankuan visits her again in her new home, much changed and very resigned. Shanghai seems to have been a mirage, or a happy dream…