My Heart Is That Eternal Rose (1989) User Reviews

Dark, powerful, emotional and violent

[carloshuidobro · 10/10 · 30 May 2006]

I saw this movie recently, and I must say it oversize all my previsions. It is an excellent, well paced, heroic bloodseed flick. The most interesting part is the fact that normally HK flicks talk about honor and friendship, while this one also talks about love.

The story is very simple: an impossible love, reached by an fortuite event. With this cards over the table, the movie goes into a roller coaster of emotions, touching in a very realistic way (as we are used to) and driving us into the world of the triads.

I love the fact that characters are very well defined, just with simple and short scenes: Its easy to understand and feel their emotions and motivations, as you identify totally with them.

Two special mentions: the firs one to Gordon Liu, in a role we are not used to see him, REALLY great. The other is for Mr. Doyle (ussual in Wong Kar Wai films, as photography director). In this movie, as always, he makes a superb work, recreating an axfisiating atmosphere with saturated colors.

Great film, great actors, great cinematography... and a hard-as-nails ending that will keep your mouth open for weeks!!! Thumbs up for this one

Classic tragic hero film

[sumdenguy · 17 March 2003]

This film is one of the best gangster flicks ever to come out of Hong Kong. Incredibly photographed, it is the classic tragic hero film. Unfortunately, the original print is forever destroyed, therefore, this movie will ONLY be available on VHS. The ending is one of the bloodiest, most brutal gunfights ever captured on film...easily puts John Woo choreography to shame. Parts of it don't hold up to todays standards but believe me when I tell you to seek out and watch this movie at all costs.

Don't you think it is odd that after all this time there are only two other reviews on here?

[chrichtonsworld · 4/10 · 28 August 2015]

And that both of the two other reviews are positive? That is very suspicious if you ask me.

Anyway now here is my review (which you can find on my site called chrichtonsworld): In my search for everything heroic bloodshed My Heart is that Eternal Rose has popped up several times. And when you read the reviews most of them are positive. I only could find one negative review on HKMDB but that was more because the reviewer could not remember the film and was unable to track down the title to do a proper review. I don't know about you but whenever this happens my Spidey sense goes into overdrive. Even the most perfect masterpieces get negative reviews. So if those are non existent then I question the honesty of the reviewers.

Especially after having seen this film I am astonished that it gets so much praise in the first place. There is nothing extraordinary about it. In fact I think it is pretty average bordering to incredibly bad. Maybe a case could be made in favour of the camera work with the use of it's colours. But that really is about it. The supposedly brilliance of director Patrick Tam (He is known as the mentor of Wong Kar-wai.) is nowhere to be found. In fact if you ask me this film was stylish in all the wrong places. There are a lot of scenes where slow motion was used when there was no use or point to it. It only delayed the already super slow action. At one point it's used for like thirty seconds in a scene where all you see is a black wall and a little smoke. (Ok exaggeration on my part. It was more like ten seconds. But that is similar to two hours in cat years.) In another scene slow motion is used where character played by Tony Leung gets pushed out of the car. It takes forever with very little positive effect. I mean what was the point of that? Then there were some freeze frames undoubtedly for dramatic effect but here it came off as comedic. I could have overlooked the shortage of action and the misplaced stylization. But not the overly melodramatic empty triangle love story. It was tragic just for the sake of being tragic devoid of any logic or reason. It did help to have Toney Leung Chiu-Wai and Joey Wong to portray the characters. They did bring this film a little credibility. Still they were not given that much material to work with and you can tell that for the most part they felt lost. Which I assume a lot of people are confusing with artistic and symbolic depth.

Apart from the title there is nothing artistic or poetic about this film. It simply is a very poorly made movie that drags on throughout. The few action scenes that are present are far too short and not very enjoyable and therefore ultimately pointless. This film would have been more effective had it just been filming the roses (that are shown in the beginning) for 90 minutes.

Seriously this film is a waste of your time. Especially if you are looking for a decent heroic bloodshed title. This is just an overly melodramatic but incredibly minimalistic love story with no redeeming factors whatsoever. AVOID!