The Phantom Lover

This grandiose vehicle for Leslie Cheung was intended to launch his comeback from a few years of 'retirement' as a singer, but neither the movie nor the soundtrack CD impressed the justifiably cynical HK public. Shot in China and based on a much more interesting 1937 melodrama made in Shanghai, it's a thinly plotted riff on the Phantom of the Opera story: Cheung plays the acid-scarred tenor who's reduced to warbling to his true love from behind a curtain while a surrogate beau mimes his words on stage. Awesomely insincere, the film piles on the romantic imagery and hopes the anachronistic score will glutinise the viewer's natural resistance.