General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Comrades: Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜)

Comrades: Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜) is a 1996 Hong Kong romantic drama directed and produced by Peter Chan (陳可辛), written by Ivy Ho (岸西), and starring Leon Lai, Maggie Cheung, Eric Tsang, and Kristy Yang. It follows two mainland Chinese migrants, Li Xiaojun (黎小軍) and Li Qiao (李翹), who meet as new arrivals in 1980s Hong Kong, fall in love, separate into other relationships, and reunite by chance in New York when news breaks of the singer Teresa Teng's death.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	2 November 1996 in Hong Kong and Taiwan; restored version released in mainland China on 13 February 2015²
Credits	Director and producer Peter Chan; screenplay Ivy Ho; cinematography Jingle Ma (馬楚成); production companies Golden Harvest and UFO¹
Cast	Leon Lai (Li Xiaojun), Maggie Cheung (Li Qiao), Eric Tsang (Pao哥), Kristy Yang (Xiaoting)¹
Format	118 minutes, color, Cantonese with Mandarin and English also spoken¹^•²
Awards	Nine prizes at the 16th Hong Kong Film Awards (1997), including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor; Best Picture at the 34th Golden Horse Awards³^•⁴
Recognition	Named one of Time magazine's ten best films of the year; Golden Space Needle Audience Awards at the Seattle International Film Festival, 1997³^•⁵
Music	Teresa Teng's song "Tian Mi Mi" runs through the film as its thematic thread⁶

Spoilers

Story

The film opens in the mid-1980s. Li Xiaojun, a young man from the mainland, arrives in Hong Kong to make money so that he can bring his girlfriend Xiaoting over and marry her. Li Qiao, an ambitious migrant from Guangzhou who avoids advertising her mainland identity, meets him at a fast-food restaurant where both work. Their shared fondness for Teresa Teng's songs eases their loneliness, and friendship grows into love. Neither acts on it at first: Xiaojun will not break his promise to Xiaoting, and Li Qiao, who left home to build a life, does not want love as her only reward.⁷^•⁸

In 1990 Xiaoting arrives to marry Xiaojun, and Li Qiao takes refuge with the triad figure Pao哥 (Brother Pao), played by Eric Tsang. When the two lovers finally decide to run away together, Pao哥 gets into trouble and flees, and Li Qiao follows him into exile. In 1995, on 8 May, the date of Teresa Teng's death, the two stand before a shop window in New York's Chinatown, hear the news broadcast, and find each other again as "Tian Mi Mi" plays.²^•⁸

The story spans roughly a decade of Hong Kong history. An academic account notes that the film commemorates events from 1986 to 1996, including the 1987 stock market crash, Teresa Teng's death in 1995, and the emigration wave before the 1997 handover, all seen from the viewpoint of two outsiders.⁹

Production

A film made under pressure. In 1996, the 34-year-old Chan had just suffered a box-office failure, and his company required him to shoot Jin Zhi Yu Ye 2 (金枝玉葉2). He asked, as a small condition, to shoot a low-budget film at the same time, and that film became Comrades: Almost a Love Story. He later recalled that the shoot went unusually smoothly because his pressure was invested in the other production, leaving him relaxed on this one.¹⁰^•¹¹

Casting. The role of Li Xiaojun was written for Leon Lai after he agreed to appear; the script was developed around him. Chan reasoned that Lai, born in Beijing and still perceived by many Hong Kong viewers as a northerner, suited the migrant character, and that his relative inexperience in film matched the character's rawness.¹⁰ For Li Qiao, Chan first approached Faye Wong, who declined through her agent without reading the script, an episode that nearly paralyzed the project. He eventually thought of Maggie Cheung, believing her acting could compensate for the regional mismatch.¹⁰

Themes and reception

The Hong Kong Film Archive describes the film as Chan's farewell to his company UFO and to Hong Kong before his move to the United States, and his first treatment of the outsider theme: Li Qiao and Li Xiaojun move from the mainland to Hong Kong to New York, strangers in each place. Released on the eve of the 1997 handover, it registers anxieties about dispersal, drifting, and identity, and it uses the news of Teresa Teng dying far from home, together with her song "Tian Mi Mi," to create its elegiac mood. The Archive notes that the middle-class urban romance UFO was known for becomes, in this film, a migrant's lament.¹

At the 16th Hong Kong Film Awards in 1997 the film won nine prizes, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress for Maggie Cheung, and Best Supporting Actor for Eric Tsang; it also took Best Picture at the 34th Golden Horse Awards and was named one of Time magazine's ten best films of the year.³^•¹²^•⁴ At the Seattle International Film Festival in 1997 it won the Golden Space Needle Audience Awards.⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% Tomatometer from 11 reviews and a 92% audience score.¹³

Restoration and later releases

Although beloved by mainland audiences, the film was never officially screened in mainland cinemas until 2015. In 2013 an invitation to screen it in the Venice Classics section of the 70th Venice International Film Festival gave Chan the occasion to restore the negative, which he paid for himself; after Venice he also funded a restoration of the soundtrack, re-recording the Mandarin dubbing for Maggie Cheung's character across Asia. The restored version opened in mainland China on 13 February 2015, which Chan described as a first mainland release rather than a re-release, and he stated that the purpose was not profit, since the rights remained with Warner Bros. and he could recover only the restoration costs.¹⁰^•¹⁴ The film has since returned to theaters repeatedly, including a 2016 mainland re-release of the restored "reunion" version, festival screenings in Beijing, a Korean re-release in 2026, and Hong Kong repertory screenings at the Hong Kong Film Archive and Broadway circuit.¹⁵^•¹⁶^•⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026