'July Rhapsody' Review: The Poetry of Everyday Life (2024)

Ann Hui’s eclectic films are united by a consideration of the relationship between public and private worlds, of how the weight of history can be brought to bear on even the most intimate personal developments. The director’s beautiful 2002 drama July Rhapsody, now receiving its first stateside theatrical run courtesy of Cheng Cheng Films, both follows this thread and pulls it in a uniquely tender and thoughtful direction. Unlike much of her previous work, the histories excavated by the film are strictly personal, but they contribute to a far more wide-ranging treatise on the resonance of artistic expression across time and generations.

Another thread through Hui’s work is its kinship with Chinese literature, from the filmmaker’s three adaptations of Eileen Chang novels (1984’s Love in a Fallen City, 1997’s Eighteen Springs, and 2020’s Love After Love) to last year’s Elegies, a documentary on Hong Kong poetry. That affinity is deeply felt in July Rhapsody, which follows a meek, middle-aged Chinese literature teacher named Lam (Jacky Cheung) as he balances a strained marriage with his wife, Ching (Anita Mui), with the romantic advances of a precocious student, Wu (Karena Lam).

The film’s Chinese title translates literally to Man, 40, marking it both as a reflection on middle age and as a companion piece to Hui’s 1995 film Summer Snow, titled Woman, 40 in Hong Kong. The diptych represents Hui’s return to highly personal filmmaking following a period of relatively commercial projects (including 1990’s The Swordsman and 1996’s The Stunt Woman), and her investment in her characters and their passions bleeds through every frame.

July Rhapsody opens with something of a present-tense framing device, as Lam decides to divulge the story revealed in the film’s deceptively clever flashback structure to his college-aged son, On-Yin (Shaun Tam). The story explains the birth of Ching’s eldest son, Yue (Eric Kot), of whom Lam isn’t the father. Without revealing too much, the film’s past- and present-tense narratives unfold almost simultaneously, the echoes between them becoming a subject unto themselves. Lam’s reflections are triggered in part by his attempted seduction at the hands of Wu, whose unrefined literary talent comes alongside a brash self-possession that allows her to easily flip the traditional power dynamics of their relationship. Ching, meanwhile, deals with her own extramarital intrigue by accompanying an old flame through the last days of a fatal illness.

The film pays much attention to the specifics of the generation gap between its characters, from the teens informing the adults about which slang terms and fashion choices are “in” or “out” to the transition from analog to digital media. At one point, Ching even asks her younger son, Lui-Yin (Jin Hui), how to key in traditional Chinese characters on the computer. The topicality of such details exists alongside a wider sense of cultural heritage. For one, Lam sees himself as a keeper of the flame for Chinese literature, passing its rewards on to the next generation. His lifelong immersion in literature is understood as consolation for losing out on the financial success enjoyed by his contemporaries. “I just like to share it with others,” he explains.

Lam’s small satisfactions, though, are cold comfort for Ching, who we find at the tail end of a long 20 years as a modest homemaker. July Rhapsody was the last film that Mui, a Cantopop icon, made before her death from cervical cancer in 2003, and seeing her megawatt star power so deliberately dimmed in the part is striking. But Hui never shortchanges the character’s internal life, as we see that she, too, harbored the same hopes and passions as her eventual husband before being forced to sacrifice them at the altar of faithful motherhood.

Of particular note is Lam and Ching’s shared passion for 8th-century poet Li Bai, who occupies a similar role here as another Cantopop icon, Teresa Teng, does in 1996’s Comrades: Almost a Love Story, which was also written by Ivy Ho. They act as both shared totems in the characters’ memories and as an artistic prism that magnifies their own dramas and heartbreaks.

Poetry is everywhere in July Rhapsody, permeating the characters’ daily lives nearly as much as homework or household chores. Hui, in turn, brilliantly integrates that sense of poetry into the film’s formal language. The elegant camera movements in scenes like Lam’s first reading of Wu’s poetry or the rapturous images that make up the rose-tinted flashbacks distill complex emotions into imagery as eloquently as any of the verse recited in July Rhapsody.

The film’s key image is of the Yangtze River, which plays an important symbolic role in many of the poems Lam shares. It’s seen here only through grainy VHS footage, as neither Lam nor his wife have ever actually seen the river; for them, too, the river exists as a symbol of dashed dreams and lost youth. Again, Hui offers her own cinematic poetry in the multivalent meanings of the image: a yearning for the eternal, mediated by the mundanities of the present.