Asian traditional costume in the movie - Cheongsam

The film's original Chinese title is "花样年华" that means "the age of blossoms" or "the flowery years" which is a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love. The actress Maggie Cheung's performance just match this meaning providentially. She always worn cheongsam through the film which best reflects the women's characteristics of Hong Kong in the 1960s. 

Cheongsam is an amazing costume, not as many shining bare-chested evening dress, it wrapped very tight, but extremely sexy. In the movie, Maggie Cheung replaced two dozen dress which are all very beautiful and attractive. With the Cheongsam cloth changing, the actress showed different state of mind which looked sometimes melancholy, sometimes graceful, sometimes sad, sometimes generous. 

In the dim light, although the actress kept changing the color and style of Cheongsam, the audience still not feel redundant,  but enjoy oriental classical temperament bloom. Especially the actress's slender figure, quite natural walk swing and soft qualities create a natural era atmosphere. 

I used to experience a dress show when i was study in China in 2011. I took part in a cloth party show at the Christmas day, hold by New Dynamic Institute, which called "Super model". We have five group, each group has randomly chose a different theme to demonstrate, which include retro style, comic style, national style, preppy style and elegant style. Our group has chosen the retro style, and we have 6 girls and 2 boys. so girls are choosing the Cheong-sam, boys are choosing Chinese tunic suit. At that time, we have to do the model show and the background music is just "Yumeji's Theme". It was so impressive that all the members try their best to win the first prize which is a crystal trophy. 

In the mood for love (2000)

"In the mood for love" is a 2000 Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, and this is his seventh movie. The video below is the trailer of this movie. The background music is “Yumeji’s Theme” which is also originally from the soundtrack of Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji. It has been composed by a Japanese musician Shigeru Umebayashi, who used to the leader of Japan’s new-wave rock band. After the band broke up, he began to score films in 1985, and became best known by his score “Yumeji’s Theme” for this movie. The background music played again and again in different part of this film, to build a poignant atmosphere.

This music is really famous in film that Shigeru Umebayashi use graceful orchestral with dim lighting to give us a cheongsam show of the actress who has worn over 20 set of cheongsam cloth in the film, when the actress walked very slowly every time with slow body wave, the music began and set her figure and elegance temperament off to advantage. Since then, this theme music has become the background music of a lot cheongsam catwalk, it always connect to Cheongsam show or retro fashion show which showed the extent of its classic.

This post is about the relationship between "Yumeji's Theme" and Cheongsam dress. For my next post i will make a supplementary to describe the relationship between film and Cheongsam dress.  Asian traditional costume in the movie - Cheongsam  

The video below is an original sound tape, it's really nice to wear a headphone and listen to this piece of music, because you can hear the bass part with power. 

The phantom of the opera (2004)

The phantom of the opera is a musical film, 

The most interesting thing is the actress is a singer in this movie,as same as out of the movie. 





The video above is a piano violin duet which is performances by Taylor Davis and Lara, this is really good corporation and recomposed production.














Emmy Rossum as Christine Daaé is a real singer. 

Pirates of the Caribbean

It's really different and amazing feeling to listen to piano music after the voice of violin.



Except the celebrity, there also have many people that try to learn this music and play it to friends or upload to YouTube and Vimeo. Here is one of the example.


Piano lesson






Music score "He's a Pirate"

Secret (2007)

 

The Concert (2009)

There are a lot of films that are made for music, "Le Concert" should be one of the most famous one in this genre. It won the Best Original Score and Best sound awards at César Awards 2010. The musical work which has a central role in the film and is played during the final scene is the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 by Tchaikovsky. It is the best performance because each performer has deep emotion and strong spirit for the stage, and each of them has story behind the gorgeous.

This film described the chief conductor of the Russian opera who have been forced to leave the music scene because of rejecting to sever the Jew musicians, and became a cleaner of the theater. Many of the jews who followed Andre have become porters, taxi drivers and mechanics. Day after day, the passion of music make the music conductor anonymity work and also listen to other musicians practice performances until one day he grab a chance to change his life. Andre gathered all his old friends together to pretend the orchestra members and do the performance in Paris. Finally, their dreams come true, they win the applause and cheers for their rest of life.

Schindler's List (1993)

Nicola Benedetti won the Classical Brit Awards in 2012, and she did the performance of  violin solo for "Schindler's List". 

The video below is the encore piece after the recital of the live concert in Berlin, two artists play a duet, double bass by Božo Paradžik and piano by  Hansjacob Staemmler. 

Theme from "Schindler's List" - Live in Berlin (2010), encore