Husband and Wife

An absorbing example of genre filmmaking in the Peoples Republic of China Husband and Wife could at first glance be mistaken for any other romantic melodrama chronicling the rise and decline of a married couples love here though that love takes place in and is entirely defined by a realm of political upheaval and Maoist ideology A Shanghai intellectual marries an illiterate peasant womanturnedcollectivist hero with outcomes both universal differences emerge and specific revolutionary selfcritiques At first a popular hit the film and Zheng himself was soon critically attacked for counterrevolutionary probourgeois thought Zheng even penned a confessional autocritique but the damage to his career was done BAMPFA