POSTMODERN disappointment.
THE POSTMODERN LIFE OF MY AUNT is not a comedy, as the ads, and the poster, would suggest. Instead it’s a depressing story of how a woman’s life slides downhill. Being misled about the content of a movie (like “DIRTY FILTHY LOVE is a wacky comedy!”) is something I really hate!
There are lots of criticisms I could make of it — that Siqin Gaowa seemed too dowdy to be a Shanghai woman, and how Chow Yun-Fat looked to suave and sophisticated to be a middle-aged Mainland man. I also didn’t see the point of the young boy’s character, although I guess it is an Ann Hui trope (if that’s the right word) to have a character’s story told through the eyes of a kid. He was a real cypher, and was barely in the film at all, though. How could he even know that stuff about his aunt?
All in all, it was a big disappointment.
Oh — and I didn’t understand what was supposed to be “postmodern” about it. Was it that the woman’s idealistic Communist ideas (a metanarrative, I guess), turned out to be outmoded?