Long Live the Missus!

Cast

Jiang Tianliu (蒋天流) as Chen Sizhen, protagonist, capable housewife, and dutiful daughter-in-law;

Zhang Fa (张伐) as Tang Zhiyuan, Sizhen's husband, initially a banker who later starts his own company with his father-in-law’s money;

Shangguan Yunzhu (上官云珠) as Shi Mimi, the mistress of Zhiyuan; she is already married, but her husband uses her to scam money from other men;

Wang Yi (汪漪) as Tang Zhiqin, Zhiyuan's younger sister, who is romantically interested in Sizhen’s brother and ends up marrying him;

Han Fei (韩非) as Chen Sirui, Sizhen’s younger brother, and Tang Zhiqin’s romantic interest who ends up marrying her;

Lu Shan (路珊) as Sizhen's mother-in-law;

Shi Hui (石挥) as Old Mr. Chen, Sizhen's father, a wealthy old man who is seduced by Shi Mimi’s friend, Linlin;

Lin Zhen (林榛) as Sizhen's mother;

Cui Chaoming (崔超明) as Lawyer Yang, Zhiyuan’s good friend, who prepares the legal documents for the main couple’s divorce and the young couple’s marriage;

Sun Yi (孙仪) as Maid Zhang, who works in the household of Shizhen's mother-in-law;

Su Yun (苏芸) as Ma Linlin, Shi Mimi's friend and seductress;

Cheng Zhi (程之) as Brother Shi, Shi Mimi's husband who pretends to be her brother in order to use her to scam other men;

Tian Zhendong (田振东) as Old Mr. Zhou, Zhiyuan’s friend who invites him to Hong Kong in search of business opportunities;

Jin Gang (金刚) as Shopkeeper, from whom Chen Sirui buys pineapples to gift to his sister’s mother-in-law;

Cao Wei (曹韦) as Deputy Manager Xue, who embezzles money from Zhiyuan’s company, leaving him bankrupt;

Gao Xiao'ou (高笑鸥) as New Friend, who Sizhen and Zhiyuan witness as the next victim to fall to Shi Mimi’s cons.

Plot

The movie is set in 1947 and China is amid a civil war. Chen Sizhen is a married woman in a middle-class Shanghai family whose well-intentioned white lies meant to help family members turn out to be increasingly counter-productive, resulting in events that harm her marriage and eventually, her family finances. Her husband, Tang Zhiyuan, an ambitious but utterly incompetent bank clerk, launches a business with the financial support of his father-in-law, which Sizhen helps him secure. Blinded by the stability provided by his short-term financial gain, he falls prey to the seduction of a gold digger, Shi Mimi, and neglects his new company. As a result, his deputy manager embezzles all of his money, and the company goes bankrupt. Despite his infidelity, he blames Sizhen for his misfortune and demands a divorce. Mimi and her husband attempt to drain the rest of Zhiyuan’s money, but Sizhen forestalls the extortion attempt by outwitting Mimi and thus bails her husband out of trouble. As a result, a grateful Zhiyuan changes his mind and wishes to cancel his proposed divorce. Nonetheless, Sizhen decides that she wants to go through with the divorce. At the last moment, however, Sizhen changes her mind and recommits to her marriage at the lawyer’s office. As the reconciled couple celebrate at a café, they spot and observe Mimi using her seduction methods on a new man.

Production

Screenplay

Eileen Chang (Zhang AiLing (张爱玲)) was already a well-known essayist and novelist in China before entering the film industry. She became a screenwriter because she was “blacklisted from publishing after Japan’s defeat" due to her relationship with the top collaborationist official Hu Lancheng. Filmmaking then became an alternative way as both self-expression and employment since the film industry was struggling during the postwar period and was more tolerable of talents and celebrities' moral problems. In the 1940s, Shanghai's film industry experienced high demand for domestically produced romantic tragedies and transplanted Hollywood love stories in local settings. Chang was aware of this trend, and noted that Chinese films at the time were "practically all on the subject of love… Love which leads to a respectable marriage”. This film, addressing the topic of love, has been associated most strongly with Chang’s philosophical vision expressing the plight of Shanghai's middle-class women within the home and her relationships (romance, marriage, and family).

As film scripts were rarely written by women in this period or even in early Chinese film history, and as the only surviving script of the two that Chang wrote that year, Long Live the Missus! embodies the "role of female creators in the anti-film mechanism of 'male gaze' and the 'female writing' against the symbolization of women". It was the director’s idea to make the movie into a comedy, and Chang choose the women’s life as the center core of this comedy. As she wrote in 1944, "I would rather write nothing except the trivial matters between a man and a woman. There is neither war nor revolution in my work." It marks Eileen Chang’s signature style of a tragic comedy with a bitter-sweet ending where the characters would experience a "little reunion," but no grand finale like the audience typically anticipated. In a review of her own film Long Live the Missus!, Chang says the character "Sizhen's happy ending isn't all that happy." She elaborates that the idea of "a bittersweet mid-life probably means there will always be small pains interwoven in the happy moments, but there are moments of comfort."

Sizhen's choice to reconcile with Zhiyuan might be seen as controversial, especially because the "women's question" was at the forefront of the discussion during the Republican Era. Sizhen is not portrayed as the strong female lead who advocates for her independence and pursues love. Just as Eileen Chang said, "I did not affirm or protect Chen Sizhen. I only mentioned her as such a person." The way Chen Sizhen's character as the protagonist is portrayed is exactly the starting point and foothold of all comedy effects of “Long Live the Missus!” as a comedy film. More importantly, referring to Sizhen only as a person, Chang refuses to discuss the women's problem as "a reductive binarism of women against men, us against them, good against evil." Such refusal has provided Long Live the Missus! the opportunity to subvert the mainstream discussion and cultural discourses at the time. Chang does not depict Sizhen as a mere female victim hurt by men, and even portrays Sizhen as an individual who has the ability to establish relations inside and outside of the family. Chang explains her heroine: "cleverly deals with people in a fairly large family. Out of consideration for the interests of the whole family, she nurses various grievances. But her suffering is almost nothing compared with the agonizing sacrifices Chinese women made in the old times... We should not look at her as a victim of the social system, since her behavior is out of her own free will." Chang is aware of the discussion of the woman's question since the May Fourth Movement, and the women who suffered because of the social system, yet she believes that Long Live the Missus! could explore more potentials of the portrayal of female characters and stories.

Themes

Marriage & Family

Long Live the Missus! tells the story of a middle-class family. Through the repressed state of women under the traditional patriarchal culture, it shows "the value crisis encountered by traditional morality, family, ethical structure and gender relations at the turn of the new era". It centers on women dealing with pressure and expectation to conform to family roles as a dutiful daughter-in-law, a child-bearer, and a good wife. Traditionally, it was common for several generations to live under one roof together, and the wife would move in with her husband’s family, which is the case in this film. The mother runs the household and treats the daughter-in-law in a grating manner which is made clear when Sizhen is seen constantly waiting on her mother-in-law's hand and foot. Missus is an English translation of the Mandarin word tai tai, meaning “wife” or a wealthy married woman who does not work. In particular, tai tai in the context of the film refers to the socialized aspects of a wife in the domestic context and the somewhat scheming nature of the women.

Sizhen’s central position in her domestic world consists of her absolute and stoical dedication to the needs of her husband and her family. From asking her brother to buy pineapples for her mother-in-law to changing her husband’s shoes and listening to his complaints, Sizhen strives to be a good wife who is willing to compromise and sacrifice herself in her complicated family relationships. She is willing to please everyone and be at their service, but all she receives from them is abuse (especially from her husband and mother-in-law who blame her for lying to her father about the gold bars). Sizhen’s dishonest behaviour is therefore “her comedic means of survival within a limited, oppressive situation”. Yet, the movie romanticizes her oppressive marriage and domestic life through her elegant look and fashion, which is achieved by the extravagant silk qipao, handbags, sunglasses, and accessories she wears. Given this, the movie may have suggested to female audiences that marriage is not so bad after all, as it comes with the financial benefits of being able to dress well and have leisure time.

Besides the constant devotion to her husband, the couple’s marriage is dull. The unromantic relationship and Sizhen’s failure to bear a child contradicts the warm and affectionate wedding picture that hangs above their bed (a typical custom of modern Shanghai couples). This stark contrast cleverly portrays the “reality of married life versus the ideal of modern marriage.”

Chinese Comedy of Manners

The term comedy of manners refers to the genre of satirical comedy representative of the Restoration period (1660–1710) that challenges and criticizes the manners and social conventions of a highly sophisticated, artificial society.

Despite its Western origin, comedy of manners was appropriated by Eileen Chang for her own aesthetics. What has made Chang's opinion on comedy here remarkable is not so much her acknowledgement of laughing as natural, but her insight into the coexistence of tragic and comic constituents. Comedy provides an effective channel to express the double aspect—bodily instinct and rational intellect—of human lives. This dualistic view on human's living condition is manifested in Chang's opinion on Chen Sizhen. Chang asserted:

"Eventually she has a happy ending, but she is still not particularly happy. The so-called "bittersweet middle age" probably implies that there is always some sadness mingled in their [middle-aged people] happiness. Their sadness however is not completely without comfort. I very much like these few characters' "fushi de beiai" (sadness of the floating life). But it were "fushi de beihuan" (sadness and happiness of the floating life), then it would in fact be more pitiful than "sadness of the floating life," as it contains a feeling of vast vicissitudes."

There are similarities between Long Live the Missus! and the Hollywood screwball comedies, such as the focus on the love conflict/battling process of a (mismatched) couple, juxtaposition (of all male and female, capable and incapable), coincidences and chance encounters in the plot. Long Live the Missus! accounts an ordinary housewife's life. It is set in the most common locale—Shanghai's nongtang, where Chang claimed "there can be several Chen Sizhen in just one house." In contrast, most of the screwball comedies were played out against settings of sheer affluence (a Connecticut estate or a Park Avenue penthouse), properties (elegant clothes, cars, and furniture), and lines (witty and inventive repartee).

Like her narratives on wartime China, Chang’s screenplay parodies the manners and emotions of Shanghai’s middle-class, with a particular focus on the pettiness, hypocrisy and infidelity. Characters such as Sizhen, the noble and forgiving housewife, Zhiyuan, Sizhen’s easily manipulated husband, and Mimi, Zhiyuan’s mistress and con woman, illustrate those shortcomings common to Shanghai urbanites. Here, Chang applies one of her preferred story techniques of “uneven contrast (cenci de duichao)" by portraying these characters as stereotypical of Shanghai middle-class, as none of them are “enlightened or perverse to an extreme."

Critical reception

As “the fourth of a string of popular Wenhua films,” Long Live The Missus! was widely assailed by the press and has been praised by critics across Taiwan Straits as an ‘absolutely underestimated masterpiece in the history of Chinese cinema’ and considered ‘the best Chinese comedy ever made.’ Long Live The Missus! was positively received partially due to the fact that it had catered to the Shanghai audience's appetite for family melodrama and films that dealt with women in familial and social situations.

Long Live the Missus! has been described as a generally apolitical film in terms of theme and tone, and it is true that issues of rich and poor do not surface in its story. However, much of Eileen Chang’s work contains themes of seduction and betrayal, and this film is not without its ‘political’ points relating to women. In addition to the portrayal of ordinary Shanghai women in a time of economic crisis and cultural conflicts, this film brings awareness to gender relationships, middle-class family life, and the complex politics of Chinese cinema in post-war China.

The film was attached to the biography of Eileen Chang. She was denounced as "a walking corpse from the Occupation period," and her film "encourages the audience to continue indulging in their familiar xiao shimin world of stupor and misery," by asking women to "continue making willing sacrifice."

Chinese scholars Sun Yu and Zheng Xin argue that Sang Hu transformed Eileen Chang's tragic depictions of an "ephemeral age" into a more optimistic and lighthearted perspective using his comic techniques.

In 2005, the film was voted #81 in the list of the Best 100 Chinese Motion Pictures at the Hong Kong Film Awards.