“It was winter and cold and we were two lonely people keeping each other warm.”

One of the great Hong Kong romances, director Peter Chan doesn’t consider his own Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) to be a romantic film. Here’s his response to a South China Morning Post 2021 question asking him to describe the film’s plot 25 years later:

It’s a film that traces the lives of two mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong and eventually New York. It’s basically about two very lonely people being taken away from their roots. It’s not really a love story because it is not love at first sight. I don’t think they know they love each other. It’s more about sharing an experience together, which leads to a relationship. 

Peter Chan, in an interview with the South China Morning Post

Maybe his definition of a romance film is a bit narrow here—something to do with the fictitious, romantic possibilities of a “first sight.” In that case, he’s right. Comrades, Almost a Love Story is the antithesis to Hallmark romances, happy ending princess fairytales, and Netflix’s teen dream gluttonies. “It was winter and cold and we were two lonely people keeping each other warm,” says Maggie Cheung’s Lee Kiu, in a Mcdonald’s, to fellow Mainland emigrant Lai Siu Gwan (Leon Lai). The essence of traditional romance is simple desire; the essence of Comrades is something more political, though it wields desire (denied) to get where it needs to be.

The two hookup and begin a sexy and sex filled affair, although Lai is still engaged to Fong Siu Ting (Kristy Yang), a Mainlander who hasn’t yet emigrated. (This is no chaste In the Mood for Love.) Not knowing Cantonese, one of the first things he does after arriving in Hong Kong is make the mandatory capitalist pilgrimage at the local Mcdonald’s, where he meets Lee. In addition to McDonald’s, she works a side-hustle at an English language learning organization for fellow Mandarin speaking immigrants. (The legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle also plays an English teacher, a sort of sleazy fellow named Jeremy that teaches language through vulgar goofball comedy one-liners.) A true capitalist, she lacks the time for meaningful non-material goods: no friends, no romantic partners, no hobbies of note. They emigrated to the bustling beacon of Hong Kong for contrasting reasons. She moved to the City of Life with the dream of buying a house for her and her mom, who still lives in Guangzhou; Lai has less economic, more domestic oriented life-goals. Their dreams, unattainable only through ultimately not-worth-it hardships, are incompatible with each other. Their love, based on material circumstance alone, is as doomed as Khosrow and Shirin.

In between these chapters of longing and longing denied, we glimpse into longing fulfilled—or, at least, quenched. The great first kiss between the adulterous Lai and the wanting Lee is one of the sexiest ever put on film. Like many great kiss scenes, it’s not the luridness or sumptuousness of the kiss itself that makes it magical but rather the rapid tug-and-pull of the courtship that creates the intimate scene: buttoning up of jackets, slow close-ups on hands, lips that draw each other like magnets. As great as this moment is, their relationship, knowingly doomed from the start, never matches the spark of the first fling.

And their situations embody the reality of how capitalism, as a symbol of industrial and sensorial modernity rather than as an economic system, affects relationships. In pre-industrial cultures and times, daily relationships were more tangible, physical, and real. They were not maintained through the chore of a daily long-distance phone call, as Lai half-heartedly keeps his relationship with Fong alive. Nor were they financially, and thus, from a time management perspective, inaccessible, as is the case for Lee, an altogether typical believer in the great Hong Kong capitalist dream. Lai isn’t unhappy with his fiancée—he loves her dearly, and it’s his life goal to marry her—but he has a longing, a need, for love that the conditions of modernity don’t allow him to fulfill with her, at least not at the moment he needs it most: as an immigrant unable to communicate in the majority tongue, isolated from nearly everyone he knows in the world other than his aunt and her brothel connections (again: a job whose body-selling nature speaks specifically to the capitalist reality). 

These modes of being in relationship with one another speak to something larger, something more political, than a typical “urban isolation romance,” to use the sub-genre description given by Sean Gilman (The End of Cinema; The Chinese Cinema). They speak to where we are now. This is the world we have built. In the film’s most memorable bits of cinematography, we see the adulterous couple through the portal of an ATM. Framed as a picture within the frame, the majority of the screen is washed away with black negative space—erasing the never-ending city of Hong Kong and replacing it with cash transactions. Without the resource of cash, they have no world. There would be no Hong Kong. There could be no affair, no romance. Unfortunately, none of the potential couplings are made to last.