In China, the holiday movie season — the local media calls it “New Year’s celebrating season”,  “贺岁档”  — starts in December and lasts through the Spring Festival break. Studios always save their most prestigious films for these two months.

Mei Lanfang (梅兰芳), a biopic about the titular 20th century Chinese opera star, has been given a western-style name: Forever Enthralled. Directed by Chen Kaige and starring Zhang Ziyi and Leon Lai, Forever Enthralled is expected to be the first box office hit this season.

Chen Kaige’s 1993 masterpiece Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬) was a film about two stars in a Peking opera troupe and the woman who came between them. At the Cannes Film Festival, the film was awarded the highest prize, the Golden Palm Award. As the second Chen Kaige film related to Chinese opera, Forever Enthralled is said to be a successor with the spirit of Farewell My Concubine.

However, Chen Kaige’s last film The Promise (无极) was a disaster which brought many hilarious parodies, of which the most famous one is A Murder Caused by a Steamed Bun (一个馒头引发的血案). The ridiculous storyline of The Promise has destroyed Chen’s reputation on Chinese film critics’ minds. So we’re wondering if his story telling skills have improved in the past few years.

In the trailer, you can find a character yelling “to be or no to be” in a street in New York. It’s so weird, isn’t it?

Release date: December 5th, 2008 (Tonight!)