Comrades, Almost a Love Story

Xiaojun leaves mainland China for Hong Kong with a modest goal: to earn and save enough money that he can return home and marry the girlfriend he left behind. In the city he meets Qiao, a young woman with her own ambitions and a far more practical grasp of how Hong Kong works. The two become friends, then something closer, and their relationship develops in spite of the pull of the life Xiaojun still intends to go back to.

Their story unfolds against Hong Kong in the years around the 1997 handover, moving between the city and New York, and Teresa Teng's songs run through it as a shared point of reference. Peter Chan directed and produced the film, with a screenplay by Ivy Ho; Maggie Cheung plays Qiao and Leon Lai plays Xiaojun, with Eric Tsang, Kristy Yang, Christopher Doyle and Joe Cheung among the supporting cast, twenty-three credited performers in all. It runs 118 minutes and was released in November 1996. At the time, it was the fifth film in Chan's directing filmography. Audience response has been strong and durable: on IMDb it holds 8.1/10 from 8,900 votes, and on TMDB 7.9/10 from 184 votes, while the critics' rating stands at 7.2/10 from 11 reviews.