The opening night film of the ACMI’s season uncovering Hong Kong 1960s screen superstar Linda Lin Dai, Love Without End lives up to its fiercely melodramatic title. The film suggests that love is not only what two people possess, but what they hold back despite the personal cost, and the story becomes a tragedy of self-sacrifice and the best intentions. Debts and obligations are as important as vows and celebrations in Ching Doe’s black and white picture, which stays the course until the final tear jerking end where the love can only be celebrated by a lasting, painful separation.
This is an approach that in most instances no longer makes it to contemporary screens, but melodrama is a staple of the world cinema, and Hong Kong filmmakers have long known how to craft it. The fulcrum here is the film’s star, Linda Lin Dai, who can let each scene’s emotional intent play out on her face so that it has a softened finality – the writing can be blunt, but her playing is not, even when old-fashioned stage directions such as a tearful rush from an argument must end with throwing herself onto a bed.
Lin Dai plays Qingqing, a just orphaned rural innocent who can’t even bring herself to step inside a Hong Kong nightclub to ask if she can see her uncle, the venue’s piano player. Standing on the balcony, tearfully looking – in both mourning and relief – at the city’s daunting skyline, she meets Tang Pengnan (Kwan Shan), the somewhat drunk son of a local business man who mistakenly thinks that she is about to leap to her death. Assured of her safe intentions, he tries to make amends by coaxing her onstage to sing. She resists, but eventually receives a standing ovation (Lin Dai was dubbed) and thus promptly faints.
The pattern is set. Each attempt by the star-crossed couple to help each other comes with a price. When Pengnan’s businessman father dies, the son must attend to the financially shaky family construction company. The couple formally separate, but to clear the firm’s debts Qingqing agrees to spend a year as the secretary of a shady traveling businessman (although the film is hardly prurient, it’s left unstated as to whether the now successful nightclub singer has sexual obligations), with her salary being secretly filtered to Pengnan by a mutual friend.
But just before she departs they reunite, and after a night together he proposes. When Qingqing can’t explain why she has to leave for 12 months he becomes angry and they argue – tearful dash to bed shot – before he storms out. Loss is the ultimate currency in such a film, even if Ching Doe surprisingly eschews close-ups in favour of a watchful middle distance that captures the immaculately designed sets and their dressing, and separation is matched by further death – their mutual friend – before the further escalation of Qingqing having a fatal illness.
The official diagnosis is septicaemia, but I’m reasonably certain it’s Film Star Disease, the same thing Bette Davis had in Dark Victory, where the film’s glowing leading lady shows not a symptom of her looming end until the day prior. In a telling sign of the era, Pengnan along with Qingqing’s friends, do not tell her. Eventually he knows, but is saying nothing to make her happy, but she does know and is saying nothing to make him happy. 'I want her to die in my arms," Pengnan eventually cries, but this genre knows it is more powerful to have him fall just short.
