Multiple times of conflict, times of conflicting humanity and feelings. Yim Ho's deep down theme running through the award winning Red Dust is just that. Offering up a challenging cinematic atmosphere, the film is a fine example of much communicated with the outermost clarity to ALL walks of life, despite it being very much a strictly Chinese film at heart. Simple title cards throughout doesn't mean he and co-writer Echo Chen are simplifying things historically but ultimately the film is about people anyway so a detailed history homework is not needed. Any viewer will feel invited.

Red Dust offers up a kind of classical war time romance, only not set on the battlefield. It gives us portraits of people willing to go along with their emotions as long as the surrounding times of conflict will allow that. Starting point being the main story of Shao Hua and Chang. A fit yet not, she being an outspoken writer and he a Japanese collaborator trying to put heart into his work towards the fellow Chinese, there's a quote brought up in the film about following a tide which translates to so many different choices one can pursue. Shao and Chang switches between shutting off the world to realizing their duties in it and it's this constant flip-flop that makes Red Dust an effective and slightly haunting experience. You care about characters wanting to obtain love but Yim Ho can't offer up any pleasant solutions because neither eras examined are about true love, only for the prosperity of your country...for better or worse. Therefore these characters do operate on the outskirts of society, even being enemies of it due to laws inflicted upon China at the time.

While it is indeed clear that Yim Ho is going to flow with the tide that the history dictates, it's nonetheless thoroughly affecting to flow along with the film. He creates a fine combination of being suitably epic but in tune with the intimacy that the story requires. When these intimate bubbles burst, he finds a tuned balance between the war epic and melodrama. The best thing is that it constantly continues on being challenging, quite unexpected and offering up what seems like old but ultimately fresh ideas about humanity in a era upon era of violent conflict. Dreamy and epic cinematography by Poon Hang-Sang (Kung Fu Hustle, Fearless) works wonders for all this as well as the parallel fictional story by Shao Hua about Jade Orchid's destiny. Here it's sometimes in-camera solutions used, blurring the line between the reality we're in and taking on a welcome arthouse feel that is easy to grasp.

Supporting cast of Maggie Cheung, Richard Ng and Chin Han might as well go unmentioned because they do immersing work for Red Dust. However Brigitte Lin one can dedicate paragraphs to for her splendid work here. It's lovely to see her go through so many stages of being a woman, something not commonly associated with her since the career involved iconic performances in Swordsman II and The Bride With White Hair. In Red Dust we get a taste of the girlish nature, innocence, longing and her facing the choices of how to proceed from the next era to the next, all handled with grace, humanity and perfect emotional pitch by Lin.

Yim Ho hasn't always had it easy with critics or his personal visions (see King Of Chess) but Red Dust feels untouched and therefore highly well realized. Dealing with Chinese history, its heartfelt, conflicts reaches us and are telling in the most clear of ways. It's expected early that history as written won't be a backdrop for a perfect movie romance but it's still a fully realized portrayal of attempt upon attempt to try and shut out war and internal Chinese conflict in favour of intimacy. Did love have a place in the creation of New China? There's certainly belief in that but history is still written. Therefore the movie seems as well but every new corner holds emotional surprise.

(1) A frequent co-star with Brigitte Lin in 1970s Taiwanese cinema, including in her debut Outside The Window. They were also an item at one point.

Yim Ho creates an atmospherically exquisite and densely allusive, yet simple and elegant chronicle of love, sacrifice, and survival amidst national turmoil in Red Dust. Yim's repeated imagery of the color red (and in particular, red dots) throughout the film creates a provocative correlation between the era of Japanese occupation and the establishment of communism in postwar mainland China: the blood on Shao-Hua's cherished childhood toy after an attempted suicide during her parental captivity; the saturating, warm, red hued lighting associated with Shao-Hua's apartment; the red shawl that Neng-Tsai presents to Shao-Hua as a radio broadcast comments on the escalating conflict between the Chinese and Japanese for the control of Manchkuo; the inferred massacre of students during the civil war between the nationalists and the communists. Note the transitional shot of Jade Orchid in an open area adorned with long and winding red dotted banners that is visually continued in the sight of occupation forces marching into town and waving Japanese flags, and is subsequently repeated in her brief moment of innocent, playful joy that precedes a chaotic bombing episode as she and Spring Hope momentarily take refuge in a tunnel. It is a distilled and symbolic juxtaposition that interweaves a fleeting sentiment of uninhibited freedom and rapture against a pervasive, enveloping environment of looming (and metaphoric) uncertainty - an indelible, transitory snapshot of the gradual erosion and insignificance of humanity and personal desire against the crushing weight of a formidable and inescapable national tide.