aka Song at Midnight
Every midnight Xia listens for the song of her lover, dead ten years now. He never fails her.
Song Dan-Ping had been a revolutionary forced to flee his home and take up a new life and new identity. Changing his name, he became an actor. Success and fame followed, and soon he had met an admirer in Xia. The two fell in love. Unhappily for them Xia's father, a general, had already arranged for her to marry another, a financially advantageous alliance. Actors being amongst the lowest class, Song never had a chance.
The fiance Tang Jun was a cruel and proprietous man. When Xia defied him for Song, Jung flung acid into Song's face. Disfigured and ashamed, Song had word sent to his beloved that he had died - hoping to spare her. Instead, it sent her mad.
We learn all this in flashback halfway through the movie, related by the very-much-alive Song who serenades Xia every night. It's not a spoiler, for a ghost he's very physical. Ye ban ge sheng was inspred by the classic Universal horror films of the Thirties, and by the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera. Director Weibang Ma-Xu imbues his frames with gloom, dread, and loneliness, not a single moment taking place in daylight hours. Rain falls, fog drifts, cobwebs waft. Men and Women in Western dress emerge from Western automobiles to seek shelter in a ton closed down for the night. it's a town where the people lurk in superstitious fear of the ghostly singing that comes every night. They all know the legend of the doomed love. The performances are often exaggerated, adding to a creeping sense of unreality and theatricality.
Into this comes a theater troupe looking for a venue. Its best to warn that the most easily available copy (it's on YouTube) is difficult to follow in places. For one thing it suffers poorly translated English subtitles. They make for an amusing read, but are nearly incomprehensible - I'd advise you to skim them for a general suggestion of meaning rather than pay strict attention to them. Also problematic are the visuals, lovely as they are. It's a dark film by design with an alluring lighting scheme, and unfortunately age has only deepened it's shadows to overwhelm much of the scenery. If Ybgs could have a digital restoration, it would be a textural wonder. Are you listening, Criterion? Ye ban ge sheng is reputed to be China's first horror film surely deserving of inclusion in the Criterion Collection right there.
The troupe makes itself at home in a lodging house and begins to renovate the disused theater, not knowing that it it now the home of the "phantom" Song. Song sees in leading man Xiao Ou a chance to reach out to Xia and earns his favor by becoming a secret vocal tutor. In exchange Ou approaches Xia, who mistakes him for her lost love become flesh again. Unbeknownst to any of them, tragedy looms again as Ou's own girlfriend catches the eyes of the unrepentant Tang Jun, who - being upper class - got away with the assault on Song Dan-Ping ten years earlier.
Ye ban ge sheng is not an apolitical film, not are it's politics easy. It's backdrop and heart lay with an aversion to the warlord's feudalism that still ruled much of China in the midst of civil war. Complicating matters, conflict with Japan had finally become all-out war in 1937. Both sides were calling for solidarity against the Japanese, a spirit that isn't reflected in Ybgs as Song, ever the activist at heart, plies Ou with a revolutionist opera and encourages his new friend to keep the cause alive. Dan-Ping's cause is the director's own and he leaves no doubt who the film's true villains are.
Ye ban ge sheng's place in the pantheon of Phantom of the Opera movies is an interesting one and deserves to be better known. What it retains of Gaston Leroux is the shamelessly romantic side of pulp - it's a movie that wears it's heart on its sleeve politically and humanely. While this Phantom, like Leroux's, is a shadowy teacher or music and aspiring composer, he is not psychotic. He is a wholly innocent figure of heartbroken love, as later Phantoms will be (see some of the TV adaptations of the 90s), playing to audience sympathy. To that end, he is also a man of attractive looks until assaulted with acid, a plot twist that originated here and transplanted whole into the next adaptation, Universal's Phantom of the Opera (1943), a prestige production directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Claude Rains as Eriq the Phantom. Even people with only a passing knowledge of the Phantom of the Opera think of his as a character disfigured by acid...you can thank Ye ban ge sheng for that. Ybgs also deviates from the Leroux in its finale, though perversely echoing Lon Chaney's 1925 classic with an exciting chase sequence involving the opera ghost and an enraged public.
In 1941, director Weibang Ma-Xu made a sequel, Ye ban ge sheng xu ji (literally 'Song at Midnight - the sequel'). Ye ban ge sheng has been remade twice, once as a two-part film in 1962 (aka The Mid-Nightmare) and again in 1995. The latter was directed by Ronnie Yu and starred Leslie Cheung. As yet I have not seen any of these.
This was my second time seeing the movie, and I have to say I'd love to own a restored copy with accurate subtitles. It's grown on me considerably, having thought it soulful but confusing the first time several years ago. "We didn't be baffled forever."
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