Love and Duty

Yang Naifan is married off, meets the man she loved at school, leaves her husband and children for him, and when he dies raises their daughter by sewing, until in the end she takes in work from the household she left, unrecognised. Ruan Lingyu plays her from schoolgirl to old woman across two and a half hours and holds every one of them. A melodrama of the old Confucian order, made as that order was breaking, from a novel by a Polish woman living in Peking. Lost for sixty years; a print turned up in Uruguay in the 1990s and came home to Taiwan. Jin Yan. Bu Wancang for Lianhua, Shanghai, 1931.