ljllili A sweet and sorrow legend of love in ancient China. But this version I think was not the best Butterfly Lovers.

martin-fennell I thought the movie was very good, and give it very good. But I give the performance of Charlie Yeung far more than that. She totally inhabits the character. It's not a performance (and I don't even like using the word "performance") that hits you straight away. It creeps up on you. People have spoken about crying over a beautiful piece of music. That is how Charlie's performance affected me. But it was more after the movie, than during it. But tears of joy. it's not powerhouse acting, but a kind of spiritual transcendence. okay that's probably going overboard, but I'll leave it there. It's hard to think of every performance. Sometimes that word has to be used. But I believe this to be my favourite. So some other thoughts on the movie. This is the second Chinese movie/hong kong (i t might have been a shaw brothers movie) I've seen where the girl disguises herself as a guy. In the first one, i thought the other characters must be blind not to notice she's a girl. I thought the same about this one. But perhaps it's a convention of these movies. Finally I thought the movie should have ended with her beautiful final words to him. I thought the afterlife scene was totally unnecessary. But thank you Charlie for your gift.

thebeautifulones The Butterfly Lovers is a Chinese legend about the tragic romance between two lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, or Liang Zhu, from whom the name of the legend is known in Chinese. The story is set in the Eastern Jin Dynasty.Zhu Yingtai is an intelligent but lazy girl who is born into a wealthy family. She was to be married off to the son of the Prime Minister, but her parents found that she was unable to recite poetry or play the guzheng (a minimum requirement for girls born of nobility). Her mother thus sent her to a college disguised as a boy.Now when Yingtai is enrolled in the college, she is given certain special privileges by the principal's wife who knew her mother (her mother studied there). This was because, Yingtai had sworn 3 oaths before entering the college (see the film for those).Yingtai met Liang ShanBo, an industrious but poor man who was studying to sit for the national exam. (In those days, to become an official, you had to sit for a national exam, these were based on poetry, the teachings of Confuscious, etc). They developed a strong bond (which causes Shan Bo to feel that he might be homosexual) with each other, and Liang ShanBo did not realise that YingTai was a girl, till the fateful meeting with his ex-classmate who had become a monk.It turns his ex-classmate was Yingtai's mother's former lover, and she gave him up so that she could marry a rich and powerful official.Yingtai's father called her back after 6 months so that they could arrange the wedding with the son of the Prime Minister, but before she sets off, she asks his classmate, Ting Mong Chun to pass a message to Shan Bo that she had to leave. They met again, and in the Goddess of Mercy cave, she chose to be his better half.The story ends in tragedy, because both lovers could not be together in life, but in death they were side by side.The chemistry between Nicky Wu and Charlie Young is almost flawless. The comic elements in the show help to ease the sad endings, but when it comes to the end, grab your Kleenex tissues.

pizzoferrato_f Tsui Hark, the master of action movie, gave us this incredibly beautiful love story.The direction is superb, the actors are great and you will find this strange but hypnotic sense of fantasy and poetry that you always find in the Chinese tales. If you don't cry at the end your heart is made of stone ! A unique masterpiece, a lot more better than Romeo + Juliet (a good movie, too!)