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Pain-Recovery Complex: Pure Love in Criss-Cross of Time and Space in East Asian Romance films

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When it comes to Asian films, the audience can seldom avoid mentioning pure love films, one of the most outstanding film genres in East Asia, featured by delicate sentiment, touching plot and unique aestheticism. In these tear gases the viewers can easily find that pain-recovery complex does exist: unrealistic romance beyond time and space can heal the audience’s pain to some extent. The paper argues pure love in East Asian romance films in crisscross of time and space plays a significant role in relieving historical, national or individual pain through parallel narrative styles, taking Japanese pure love film Love Letter (1995), South Korean romantic film The Classic (2003) and Hong Kong nostalgia film The City of Glass (1998) for …show more content…

And pure love film genre, the plot of which could seldom occurs in reality, was born based on this history background. The popular Korean pure love movies such as II Mare (2000), Ditto (2000), My Sassy Girl (2003), and The Classic (2003), has acclaimed that love could conquer time and space, social status, money and even everything. They aim at comforting national trauma (Qiu, 70), arousing national Korean consciousness and reconstructing Korean national confidence through the comfort brought by extremely moving love stories, so as to encourage the public to step out of the tragic shadow and into their own spot in the sun.
Differentiated from Japan and Korea, Hong Kong seems to own its unique colonial characteristics during the past century. Hong Kong people’s pain can be primarily showcased in their unsatisfactory with the present and uncertainty towards the future, generated by the identity crises provoked by Hong Kong’s estrangement towards motherland. Experience of colonial history for over 150 years has enabled the ordinariness of language in Hong Kong to form an international and multi-faceted structure, and simultaneously form Hong Kong people’s own identity which is different from Chinese. However, Hong Kong's handover to the mainland in 1997 resulted in a transformation and perplexity of Hong Kong: in late 1980s, there

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