General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (Sha shou hu die meng)

My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (殺手蝴蝶夢, also romanized as Sha shou hu die meng; literally "Butterfly Dream of the Killer") is a 1989 Hong Kong crime-romance film directed by Patrick Tam, starring Kenny Bee, Joey Wong, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and blending action, crime, drama, and romance.¹ It was Tam's last film before he withdrew from directing for seventeen years, and after decades of poor availability it returned to screens in a 2K restoration in the 2020s.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / romanization	殺手蝴蝶夢 (simplified 杀手蝴蝶梦); Sha shou hu die meng; alternate translated titles include My Heart Is That Eternal Love and Asia's Number One Killer³
Release	20 April 1989, Hong Kong; Cantonese language; Hong Kong rating IIB¹^•³
Runtime	91 minutes (some listings give 90 minutes)³^•⁴
Principal cast	Kenny Bee (Rick Ma), Joey Wong (Lap), Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Cheung), Kwan Hoi-San (Uncle Cheung), Michael Chan Wai-Man (Godfather Shen), Gordon Liu Chia-Hui (Lai)¹
Box office	HK$3,119,677, placing 117th for the year in Hong Kong⁵
Awards	Best Supporting Actor for Tony Leung at the 9th Hong Kong Film Awards (1990); nominations for Best Editing and Best Art Direction⁶
Later release	2K restoration from 35mm color negatives, shown theatrically from 2024 and released on Blu-ray by Radiance Films⁷^•²

Spoilers

Plot

The story opens at a beach bar run by Uncle Cheung (Kwan Hoi-San), a retired gangster, whose daughter Lap (Joey Wong) is in love with Rick (Kenny Bee). A gangster named Law Man-Shing pressures Uncle Cheung into helping smuggle his teenage son into Hong Kong, with Rick as driver and a corrupt police officer, Inspector Tang (Ng Man-Tat), in tow. A double-cross leaves the boy and Inspector Tang dead, Uncle Cheung is taken hostage, and Rick flees to the Philippines.⁸

To save her father and secure Rick's escape, Lap agrees to become the kept woman of the crime boss Godfather Shen (Michael Chan Wai-Man). Rick, unaware of the sacrifice, leaves for the Philippines and later works there as a contract killer. A title card reading "6 years later" precedes the reunion: Rick returns to Hong Kong for a hit on a tainted witness and encounters Lap, now trapped under Shen's control and admired by Shen's driver Cheung (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Lap resolves to leave Shen and flee with Rick; Cheung betrays his boss to help the couple, and Shen pursues all three. The pursuit ends in a bloody shootout in which only one of them survives.⁹^•⁸

Production and context

Tam was a leading figure of the Hong Kong New Wave, a late-1970s and 1980s movement of directors who moved from television into features and mixed modernist aesthetics with commercial genre structures.¹⁰ The film capitalized on the "heroic bloodshed" (hong Kong genre of stylized, tragic gun-crime action films) gun-crime trend that followed John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, but Tam gave it a modernist treatment in both visual style and storytelling; critics have placed it between Wong Kar-wai's cinema of longing and Woo's cinema of vengeance.¹⁰^•¹¹ It was shot by Christopher Doyle and David Chung, the key cinematographers of the New Wave in the 1980s and 1990s respectively.¹⁰

The film also marks a turning point in Tam's career. After completing it in 1989 he stopped directing, saying he needed time to adjust to the commercial considerations of filmmaking in Hong Kong, and instead worked behind the scenes as an editor, including on Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (1990) and Ashes of Time (1994). He did not direct again until After This Our Exile in 2006.¹²^•²

Style and music

Doyle and Chung's cinematography uses strong blocks of color, with the youthful scenes in soft earth tones at the bar and the later scenes under harsh neon in Shen's nightclub, where Lap is bathed in deep blue while singing on stage.⁸ Danny Chung's synth-heavy score underlines both the moody and the violent sequences.¹³ The film opens with Anita Mui's Cantopop song "Zhuang Shi De Yan Lei" (裝飾的眼淚, "Decorated Tears") over flames engulfing white roses, and the song returns when Lap sings it in a bar; BEYOND's "Xi Huan Ni" (喜歡你) is also heard.⁸^•³ The action is compact rather than spectacular: two bloody shootouts punctuate the film, with slow-motion effects and freeze-frames in the manner of John Woo.⁸

Reception and legacy

At the 9th Hong Kong Film Awards in 1990, Tony Leung won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Cheung, a performance made when he was still a television actor before his award-winning film career, and the film received nominations for Best Editing (Cheung Kwok-kuen) and Best Art Direction (Mok Kwan-jai and Patrick Tam).⁶ Critics have linked the film's imagery to Wong Kar-wai's later work: a handheld camera sequence of Rick fleeing pursuit is described as a prototype for similar movement through Chungking Mansions in Chungking Express (1994).¹⁴

The film was difficult to see for many years, circulating only in poor transfers, until a 2K restoration from the 35mm color negatives began repertory theatrical runs in 2024, released by Kani Releasing in North America and Radiance Films in the United Kingdom.⁷^•⁸ The 2024-2025 reviews consistently identify it as a high point of the Hong Kong New Wave and note its place in the genre alongside John Woo's gun-fu films.⁷^•¹⁰

References

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