Five Golden Flowers

Ah Peng and Jin Hua fall in love at a country fair before parting ways. Knowing just her name, Ah Peng sets out to look for her, only to encounter several other girls named Jin Hua. An enchanting romantic musical set in an agrarian collective.

Champion horse racer Ah Peng and mountain belle Jin Hua cross paths at an annual festival, and it’s love at first sight. Unable to meet Jin Hua the following year, Ah Peng sets out into the Cangshan mountains to look for his beloved, equipped with no other information than her name. There’s just one problem: there are a hundred girls named Jin Hua in the valley.

Set in southwestern China among the Bai community, Wang Jiayi’s classic romantic musical Five Golden Flowers is a delightful comedy of errors that advances through countless misunderstandings, messengers and lip-synched melodies. Although made during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the film minimises politics to the benefit of music, romance, folklore and colourful traditions, thanks to its marginal status as a work about an ethnic minority.

Even so, Wang’s film is thoroughly suffused with a specific political ethos, its characters swept up in a frenzy of ceaseless iron production. Romance and work made competing demands on commune supervisor Jin Hua, but as musicals through the ages have taught us, there is always time for love – a message that earned the film a ban during the Cultural Revolution a few years later.  

– Srikanth Srinivasan

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