Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) Review – Love Shaped by Time and Place

 

Header illustration for the film review essay of Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).

Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.

🎥 Film Overview

Title: Comrades: Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜 / Tián mì mì / 첨밀밀)

Director: Peter Chan (陳可辛 / Chen Ke-xin)

Release: November 16, 1996 (Hong Kong)

Runtime: 118 minutes (1 hour 58 minutes)

Genre: Romantic Drama

Screenplay: Ivy Ho (何冀平)

Country: Hong Kong

Language: Cantonese, Mandarin

Cinematography: Jingle Ma (馬楚成)

Music: Comfort Chan (陳光榮); featuring Teresa Teng's (鄧麗君) songs including "Tian Mi Mi" (甜蜜蜜) and "Wo Zhi Zai Hu Ni" (我只在乎你)

Production Company: United Filmmakers Organisation (UFO)

Distributor: Deltamac Co. Ltd.

Rating: PG (Hong Kong)

Cast: Leon Lai (黎明) (Li Xiaojun), Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) (Li Qiao), Eric Tsang (曾志偉) (Leopard), Kristy Yang (楊采妮) (Xiaoting), Irene Tsu (祖慧), Christopher Doyle (杜可風)

Box Office: HK$18.6 million (Hong Kong domestic)

Awards: 8 Hong Kong Film Awards (1997) including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Maggie Cheung), Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Editing. 9 Golden Horse Film Awards (Taiwan 1997) including Best Feature Film and Best Actress. Named one of the greatest films of Hong Kong cinema.

Critical Reception: 97% Rotten Tomatoes, 7.9/10 IMDb. Frequently cited among the finest Hong Kong films ever made.

Note: The film's title comes from Teresa Teng's famous 1979 Mandopop song "Tian Mi Mi" (甜蜜蜜), which means "sweet and honeyed." Teresa Teng (1953–1995) was a Taiwanese singer whose music was deeply beloved across mainland China, Hong Kong, and the diaspora. Her death in May 1995 became woven into the film's narrative as a historical marker. The film spans 1986–1995, framing its love story against the backdrop of Hong Kong's transformation in the years before the 1997 handover to China. Director Peter Chan went on to direct major productions including Perhaps Love (2005) and American Dreams in China (2013).

📖 Plot Summary

Hong Kong, 1986. Li Xiaojun arrives from mainland China with one purpose: earn enough to bring his fiancée over and build a future together. On his first day, he meets Li Qiao—sharp, pragmatic, also from the mainland, determined to make something of herself by any means necessary.

They are different in almost every way. Xiaojun is earnest and loyal. Qiao is calculating and ambitious. Yet they find themselves drawn together, sharing meals, speaking Mandarin in a Cantonese city, navigating foreignness as outsiders together.

A relationship forms—neither fully romantic nor simply platonic. They orbit each other across years, each time circumstances pulling them apart before anything is decided. Qiao becomes involved with Leopard, an older gangster offering stability. Xiaojun's fiancée arrives from the mainland. The two Lis lose track of each other.

Years pass. The city transforms around them. Teresa Teng dies. The 1997 handover approaches. Xiaojun and Qiao resurface in each other's lives repeatedly—always recognizing something essential, always separated before that recognition becomes completion.

The film quietly reveals how timing, circumstance, and the weight of daily survival repeatedly interrupt what might otherwise have become a simpler love story.

🌸 Key Themes

Love Shaped by Time and Space

Comrades: Almost a Love Story does not tell only a sweet love story, despite what its title suggests. Within it lie the trembling lives of individuals caught in history's current, and the emotional distance that prevents easy connection.

Love, the film insists, is not completed by feeling alone. It takes shape within the conditions of time and space in which it is placed. Xiaojun and Qiao's feelings are genuine—but they exist inside a decade of transformation, migration, and uncertain futures. The city's instability becomes inseparable from their own.

The Nostalgia of Hong Kong's Threshold Years

The music and atmosphere produce a strange, specific nostalgia—belonging to a place on the edge of change. Hong Kong before 1997 was a city aware of its own transformation. This historical context deepens the characters' anxiety and hope. Teresa Teng's voice becomes the film's emotional thread—a sound that crossed borders, carried longing, and connected the displaced. Her songs are not mere accompaniment; they are woven into what these characters feel and remember.

Timing as the Central Antagonist

The two characters repeatedly miss each other—sensing closeness without clarity, like walking through dense fog. Only when the fog lifts, after history has moved, can they finally face each other fully. The great turning gears of an era continuously displace their rhythm, revealing the film's central understanding: love is not completed by feeling alone, but takes form within the specific conditions of time and place that hold it.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Peter Chan's Direction and Maggie Cheung's Performance

Director Peter Chan contains a decade of history within an intimate story, using historical events not as backdrop decoration but as active forces shaping his characters' possibilities. His restraint in directing the central relationship is particularly notable—he allows Xiaojun and Qiao to circle each other for most of the film, never forcing resolution before the story earns it. The result accumulates weight gradually, arriving at its conclusion with the density of lived time.

Cheung won both the Hong Kong Film Award and Golden Horse Award for Best Actress—fully deserved. She plays Qiao with extraordinary complexity: pragmatic and vulnerable, calculating yet genuinely feeling, difficult to fully admire yet impossible not to understand. The scenes where her careful control briefly softens are among the most affecting in Hong Kong cinema.

Teresa Teng as Emotional Architecture

The decision to build the film's emotional structure around Teresa Teng's music and death was inspired. Her songs carry specific cultural weight—the sound of longing for home, of displaced people finding something familiar in a foreign place. Her death in 1995 becomes both historical marker and emotional turning point within the narrative.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Criterion Channel (US), Mubi (select regions), AsianCrush (free with ads)

Rent/Buy: Available for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango At Home, Vudu

Physical Media: Available on DVD and Blu-ray; Criterion Collection edition available in select regions

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Comrades: Almost a Love Story endures because it understands something simpler love stories avoid: that love does not exist outside of time and circumstance. Xiaojun and Qiao's feelings are real, but they must compete with history, survival, competing loyalties, and the relentless forward movement of a city transforming beneath their feet.

The film's power lies in the accumulation of near-misses—each revealing how close the two came, how many times the right feeling existed in the wrong conditions.

What it ultimately offers is not comfort but recognition: that some connections are genuinely shaped by forces larger than themselves, and that this does not make them less real, only differently tragic.

💭 Personal Film Reflection

Comrades: Almost a Love Story does not tell only a sweet love story, despite what its title suggests. Within it lie the trembling lives of individuals caught in history's current, and the emotional distance that prevents easy connection.

Yet the music and atmosphere that surround the entire film produce a strange nostalgia. This feeling connects deeply to the historical and social context of Hong Kong as a city. In a space shaped by repeated movement and transformation, the characters' anxiety and hope find their full weight.

In turbulent times, the two characters' love repeatedly misses its mark. They sense each other's existence, yet at every decisive moment, timing fails—and within the same city, they continue to drift in different directions.

Their relationship resembles walking through dense fog. Feeling closeness without clarity. Only when the fog finally lifts can they fully face each other.

The great turning gears of an era continuously displace their rhythm, and that displacement ultimately reveals the film's understanding of love's nature. Love is not completed by feeling alone. It takes shape—or fails to—within the conditions of time and space in which it is placed.

Some connections carry all the right feeling at all the wrong moments. The city changes. History moves. And two people who recognized something essential in each other continue to surface and submerge in each other's lives, always close, always not quite arriving.

Perhaps this is what the fog means. Not obstruction, but the particular quality of love that exists before its conditions align—present, felt, real, but not yet able to be seen clearly.

사랑은 감정만으로 완성되지 않는다. 그것이 놓인 시간과 공간의 조건 속에서, 비로소 형태를 갖는다.

(A reflection in Korean—because some truths about love and timing feel truer in the language of the heart.)

Comrades: Almost a Love Story gently reminds us that love does not exist outside of circumstance—it takes shape within the particular time and place that holds it, and sometimes that time and place are not yet ready.

💬 Join the Conversation

Have you experienced a connection shaped more by circumstance than by feeling? Have you felt the particular ache of love that existed in the wrong conditions? How do you carry memories of nearly-arrived things? Share your thoughts below.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If Comrades: Almost a Love Story's exploration of love shaped by time and history resonated with you, explore more films about connections that carry the weight of their era:

• In the Mood for Love (2000) – Love that exists in silence and suppression
• Moonlit Winter (2019) – Confronting feelings frozen in time
• Before Sunrise (1995) – Connection suspended in a single moment
• Serendipity (2001) – Love entrusted to chance and timing  
• Our Little Sister (2015) – Gentle acceptance across different histories

Each film offers its own understanding of how love is shaped not only by feeling but by the time and space that holds it.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee curates Cinematic Sanctuaries—a space for films that offer rest rather than answers. Through reflective writing on healing cinema from Japanese, Korean, and Western traditions, they explore how stories can become quiet places to recognize that love does not exist outside of time and circumstance—it takes shape within the particular conditions that hold it.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.