General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (姨妈的后现代生活)

The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (姨妈的后现代生活; pinyin: Yimā de hòuxiàndài shēnghuó) is a 2006 Hong Kong–China serio-comedy film directed by Ann Hui (许鞍华), starring Siqin Gaowa and Chow Yun-fat, with Zhao Wei and Lisa Lu in supporting roles.¹ Written by Li Qiang (李樯) and adapted from Yan Yan's (燕燕) novel of the same title, it follows Ye Rutang, a retired, college-educated woman in her late fifties whose refined Shanghai life unravels through a series of swindles, ending in her return to the northeastern industrial city of Anshan.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Ann Hui; screenplay by Li Qiang, adapted from Yan Yan's novel²
Lead cast	Siqin Gaowa (Ye Rutang), Chow Yun-fat (Pan Zhichang), Zhao Wei (daughter Liu Dafan), Lisa Lu (Mrs Shui)¹
Release	Premiered 8 September 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival; mainland China 6 March 2007; Hong Kong 8 March 2007²
Format	Mandarin-language color feature, 111 minutes³
Key crew	Cinematography Kwan Pun-leung and Yu Lik-wai; music Joe Hisaishi; editing Liao Ching-sung⁴
Major awards	27th Hong Kong Film Awards (2008): Best Actress (Siqin Gaowa) and Best Original Film Score (Joe Hisaishi) from eight nominations²
Box office	Total investment 40 million RMB; about US$670,000 in China and US$900,000 worldwide⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Ye Rutang (叶如棠), a retired single woman living alone in an old Shanghai apartment, prides herself on her university education, her British-accented English tutoring, and her Peking opera singing, while looking down on her neighbors as vulgar.²^•⁸ Her twelve-year-old nephew Kuan Kuan comes to stay, fakes his own kidnapping to extort money for a friend's plastic surgery, and is sent home; through his eyes, the film's opening shows the aunt as stingy, out of date, and absurd.²^•⁹

In the park she meets Pan Zhichang (潘知常), an aging charmer who courts her with poetry and song. After borrowing money and vanishing, he returns and draws her life savings into a fraudulent cemetery-plot investment scheme.²^•¹ She also hires Jin Yonghua, a rural woman claiming to need money for her gravely ill daughter, then dismisses her upon discovering that she stages fake accidents to extort compensation from drivers.²

After a fall leaves her hospitalized, Ye is visited by the daughter she abandoned twenty years earlier in Anshan, and she leaves Shanghai to live with the daughter and her estranged working-class husband in a cramped apartment.² A year later, Kuan Kuan visits her new home and finds her transformed, resigned to her circumstances; Shanghai has become, in the film's own phrasing, a former mirage, a dream.²

Production and origins

The project began when Li Qiang, then creative director of the Beijing production company Cheerland (其欣然影业), found Yan Yan's novel and proposed filming it; after he approached Ann Hui, she was drawn to the story, and the three parties agreed to collaborate.⁶ The film was announced in July 2005 as Hui's second feature directed in the mainland, with shooting scheduled for October of that year.⁶ It was produced by Cheerland Entertainment Organization, Class Limited, and Beijing PolyBona Film Distribution.⁴

Casting carried its own significance. For Chow Yun-fat, the role of Pan Zhichang was his first Chinese-language film after he had gone to Hollywood, and his third collaboration with Hui after The Story of Woo Viet and Love in a Fallen City.⁷^•⁶ Siqin Gaowa, a multiple winner of mainland China's Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Awards, played the title character.⁷ The music was composed by Joe Hisaishi, known for his scores for Takeshi Kitano's films, and the film used分段式 color grading to give it what the Taiwanese database atmovies describes as a dreamlike, distinctive palette.⁷^•⁴

Themes and style

The film is structured around the two cities of Ye's life, Shanghai and Anshan, presented as sharply contrasting worlds: the first a tragi-comedy of a woman clinging to refinement amid rapid modernization, the second a dark, melancholy coda.⁴^•¹⁰ Critics have read the title's "postmodern" through screenwriter Li Qiang's own description: a condition in which previously dependable values and belief systems collapse, everything becomes uncertain and blurred, and the high and the low are no longer clearly separated.¹¹ Hui herself described the film as being about a person out of step with the times, with different values and ways of living coexisting on screen.¹²

The narrative uses three seasonal movements, summer, autumn, and winter, to trace Ye's trajectory from vitality to resignation.⁸ Scholars of Hui's work also note its shifting viewpoint: the opening 27 minutes, seen largely through the nephew's eyes, present the aunt negatively as stingy and selfish, while outside that perspective she appears more sympathetically, generous to strangers and clear about right and wrong.⁹ Hui said of the character that one cannot simply call her life sad or laughable.⁹

Reception and awards

The film premiered as a special presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2006, opened in mainland China on 6 March 2007, and in Hong Kong on 8 March 2007.² At the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards in 2008 it received eight nominations and won two awards, Best Actress for Siqin Gaowa and Best Original Film Score for Joe Hisaishi; it also won Hui Best Director at the 8th Chinese Film Media Awards.²^•¹³ The Independent Cinema Office records that it won best actress and best screenplay at the 2006 Taiwan Golden Horse Awards.¹⁴ Siqin Gaowa also won Best Actress at the 14th Beijing College Student Film Festival, and the film was named one of the Ten Best Chinese-language Films at the 12th Hong Kong Film Golden Bauhinia Awards.²

Commercially the film underperformed its 40 million RMB budget, earning about US$670,000 in China and US$900,000 worldwide.⁵ Reviewers praised the central performances while noting the film's tonal shift: Variety found it stronger in its later melancholy register than in the earlier comedy, and a retrospective review judged the transition away from Siqin Gaowa's character in the final act its weakest point.¹⁵ The film has since been regarded as a representative work of Hui's career and screened in retrospectives, including the Harvard Film Archive's 2007 program of her films and a 2021 program at the Kaohsiung Film Archive.³^•¹⁶

References

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