Pure Love? Sanitized, Gendered and Multiple Modernities in Chinese Cinemas

This chapter explores through the prism of three highly popular romanticmovies Love Is Not Blind (China, 2011), You Are the Apple of My Eye (Taiwan,2011), and Love in a Puff (Hong Kong, 2010), performances or mediations ofwhat is termed sanitized modernities, modernities that are cleansed from alldirt, pollution and impurity that constitutes the everyday. The movies sharethe desire to polish the real to a level that it shines, that its surface becomessmooth and touchable, the city transparent, and our movements within itsophisticated and swift. The films articulate different modernities. In LoveIs Not Blind, the velocity of the modern, propelling ever more conspicuousconsumption, is confronted. This compressed modernity that Chinese youthis currently facing produces both a desire for as well as anxiety over a modernlifestyle. In Taiwan, it is a nostalgia for high school days that is most pertinent,and as such the movie gestures towards the past: youth is being idealized. Weare confronted here with what we can term a kawaii modernity, saturatedwith cuteness, soft-focus shots, and a profoundly romantic structure of feeling.This can be linked to the current political situation of Taiwan as a countrythat is struggling to retain its position and identity vis-à-vis a China that isgaining power so quickly on the global stage. This predicament is amplifiedin Hong Kong. Here, we witness a postcolonial anxiety, one that in real lifehad the Umbrella Movement as its somewhat later political articulation.In the movie we see characters negotiating what we can term a pragmaticmodernity, in which young people navigate through the city and quest fortheir demands by taking over back alleys, by avoiding surveillance and bygaining more space in the private realm, although they ultimately surrender.