Twin Bracelets

Twin Bracelets is a film produced in 1990 by Cosmopolitan Film Productions Co., a Hong Kongbased company that forms part of the film production conglomerate run by the Shaw brothers who are the owners of the Shaw Brothers Studio. S.L.Wei notes that Twin Bracelets was shown at international film festivals. It has won the 1992 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Award for Best Feature. John Charles called Twin Bracelets a somber, engrossing drama that is marred only by the inevitability of its narrative. The film has been labeled a lesbian film, but also a feminist film. Some critics have also focused on what they took to be its ethnological aspects. Such aspects do indeed form the background of Zhaohuan Lus short story The Twin Bracelets 1986 which served as the basis of the film script written by the film director, Yushan Huang. Huang Yushan who initially worked for Central Motion Picture Company CMPC and for the Shaw Bros. is a director who has made a choice in favor of independent film. In her life and work she is attached to feminism. According to Brnice Reynaud, she is one of the rare women to work in the Taiwanese film industry. Prof Lai has called Yushan Huang Taiwans major feminist director. S.L. Wei sees Huang as an important voice in Taiwanese womens cinema. The fact that her film Twin Bracelets received relatively much attention enabled Huang to have indepth discussions with American independent filmmakers and feminist directors. From then on she began to push consciously forward with films about women.

The two female protagonists, Hsiu and Huihua, have not yet surrendered their dreams when we observe them in the initial sequences of the film. But it is clear that they cannot escape the pressures of village society. Whatever their subjective longings, how can they turn a blind eyes to the expectations of their next of kin that are anchored in tradition? We see that these expectations are in turn influenced by social customs and by fear of gossip among neighbors. But also by the spontaneous comprehension that social roles have to be accepted if families want to make ends meet and if the local economy of a fishing village is to function as it always did.When Huihua succumbs to the expectations of her family that, at her age, she should marry and obey her husband, Xiu commits suicide. The one surrenders to the force of circumstances the others finds only a selfdestructive way out. Yet this act expresses her rebellion, her protest and revolt, and it lays bare the source of the female alliance of hope and the alternative vision it embodied. Instead of wifebeating, it was caresses that these young human beings longed for when they made their initial vow to each other that they would never marry. They had sensed the injustice enshrined in the old game of master and slave, they did not want words and deeds that boss and command and leave no alternative. They desired human respect, equality, careful awareness of each others needs. And for a short time, enabled by their affection for each other, they lived like that, turning to each other, experiencing the secluded, intimate freedom of a human relationship that was genuine and reciprocal in their acceptance of each others dignity. It was like this that exploitation could give way to cooperation, rule to freedom. It embodies, as a relationship of merely two human beings, an entire vision of how humans could live together. ........

Source: Wikipedia