Rouge 1987

In 1987 Hong Kong, Alex Man Chi-Leung as Yuen and Emily Chu Bo-Yee as Chor are drawn into a doomed 1930s romance when the ghost of courtesan Anita Mui Fleur publishes an advertisement in the papers, looking for her lost lover Leslie Cheung Chan Chen-Pang. She has waited in the afterlife for 53 years and believes he has become lost.

Chan was the playboy son of a wealthy family, but longed to be an actor, meeting and falling in love with Fleur in one of Hong Kong’s teahouses. Realising their romance would never be accepted, the couple entrusted their fate to each other and chose to end their lives with an opium overdose, hoping to be together in the afterlife.

Pragmatic Yuen and Chor become dazzled by Fleur’s story and the ghost’s glamorous beauty, yet their search for Chan slowly uncovers a harsher truth. Chan did not die with Fleur; he squandered his inheritance and now lives in poverty as a movie extra, a revelation that shocks them and forces a reconsideration of what true love and loyalty really mean.

As the film unfolds, the romance of the past casts a long shadow over the present, and the living pair begins to weigh the value of honest commitment against the glittering allure of an idealized, timeless love. The title centers on a rouge case Chan once gave Fleur, a tangible relic of their bond. Fleur returns that case to the now-elderly, guilt-wracked man before stepping back into the living world, leaving both the memory of their romance and the living couple to reflect on what remains true when fairy-tale dreams collide with real life.