Regrets can turn into curses too, according to a melancholy middle-aged woman in Lin Siyi’s beautifully designed romantic fable, Flaming Cloud (三贵情史, Sānguì qíng shǐ) The English title refers to the deaths of gods and goddesses and a physical harbinger either of the joy of reunion or the sorrow of parting. Of course, in one way it’s all the same, every hello is also a goodbye and a curse can also be a blessing depending on how you look at it.
As the narratorial voiceover explains, the heavens is where all of this starts as bored gods in a casino on a cloud place bets on the lives of mortals. A young woman approaches and places a wager on the existence of true love which is immediately countered by the bar’s musician. To carry out the wager, the gods decide to curse the then baby Sangui that anything he kisses will fall into a deep sleep until he kisses his one true love.
A kind of reverse sleeping beauty, the film follows Sangui’s path through a fairytale world where he meets various others suffering in similar ways to himself but is otherwise regarded as an outcast because of unusual ability to put people to sleep. A young woman, Yuyu (Zhou Ye), who thinks he might be her prince, introduces him to a “witch” who promises to cure his curse if only he’ll treat her chronic insomnia in which he’s had not a drop of sleep in the last 12 years. What he discovers is that she is not a witch at all but the faded star, Yuexin (Yao Chen), who tells him that she cannot cure his curse for there is nothing really wrong with him and some might even see his ability as a gift, especially those like her who have trouble sleeping.
Yuexin’s insomnia is born of past regret and the pain of lost love. She can’t sleep because she lacks the courage to face her past, while Sangui too is afraid unable to search for the girl he believes to be his one true love whom he met in childhood in case she has forgotten him or like everyone else regards him as a “freak”. Yuexin warns him that if he never gains the courage to look for Tingting (Zhou Yiran) he may regret it in time and that regret could become its own kind of curse. But in the fairytale society of White Stone he discovers only more prejudice and cruelty, stumbling on a hidden factory staffed by enslaved workers who describe themselves as being, like him, “freaks” unlikely to be missed by the world above. The villain is an exploitative factory owner whose business model is dependent on their forced labour though a mysterious ally has been helping them by smuggling medicine through the steampunk pipes that puncture their environment. They alone stand up to the factory owner, insisting that the workers are “no different” from themselves and defiantly resisting the authoritarian austerity of a wicked stepmother turned capitalist fat cat.
But the film’s Chinese title reminds that this is a story of Sangui’s love and whether his curse can be lifted or not. Yuexin realises that the choice she made may have been mistaken, while the musician who bet against the existence of true love later admits he did so because he knows it’s real but the reality is painful for him or else he just wanted to see it proved and send a message to his own lost love that they would one day meet again. Even so, that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a happy ending. The course of true love is always bittersweet and whichever way you look at it destined to end in a farewell though that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth following and not doing so out of fear is as Yuexin discovered only to suffer from the curse of regret. Featuring exquisite production design from the opening animation to the whimsical fairytale town gleefully melding eras from Yuexin’s flapper-esque costuming to the 1950s aesthetic of the factory owner’s wife and the steampunk quality of factory itself, Lin Siyi’s charming romantic fable is as much about middle-aged regret for the forgotten dream of love as it is about finding the courage to seek it out no matter the risk.
Flaming Cloud screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
Original trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 