Moonlight Serenade
The defining visual of the Shaw Brothers style is their studio. The endlessly reused, repurposed and redecorated sets of Movie Town, Shaw’s Clearwater Bay lot, large enough to hold 12 simultaneously-shooting films.
The Shaw actors, under contract to the studio, lived, ate, played and worked at Movie Town for 20 years. Outside of the occasional external or location shoot, Movie Town was Shaw Brothers.
So when Moonlight Serenade opens on an expansive mountain vista, rolling pasture leading up to rocky peaks, it’s a breathtaking leap from Shaw’s closed and theatrical standards. When the actors start singing, using the simple structures of Yellow Plum opera, the effect is even more shocking; Shaw Brothers had left the Yellow Plum genre behind years ago in favor of weepy melodramas and swordplay.
The story, as it moves between the sets of Movie Town and the mountain exteriors, moves between the tragedy of misunderstandings common in the lighter Yellow Plum films and the ugliness of human nature more prevalent in the later weepies. Jing Jing (Li Ching), a young shepherdess, continually assumes the worst of her young beau, Hui Sheng (Chin Feng). Meanwhile, two rich brothers scheme to turn Jing Jing and Si Xi, a young widow, into their concubines, using Si Xi’s scheming brother as a matchmaker.
Moonlight Serenade braids together these varied styles, and a large cast, into a small-town morality play, revealing the ugliness possible in historical rural life. Unlike many Shaw films that only indict the rich and powerful leaders, Serenade is willing to spread the blame around; only a small group of villagers defend their rights to live out from under the thumb of the rich brothers.
By switching between his luscious landscapes and theatrical Movie Town sets, made even stagier by unrealistic lighting, director Yen Chun highlights the discordance between his overly engineered plot and the significantly less-complex lives people live outside of movies. It’s not entirely successful, the actors are far from Shaw’s A-list and the plot does become more than a bit convoluted and irrational, but it certainly does stand out from the other Shaw movies of 1967.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2004-07-20