An early film by director Cai Chusheng (who also wrote the script). Like other films of the time (such as those by Bu Wangcang) the characters are highly westernised.
Lo Wen [Gao Zhanfei] is a handsome author married to SuWen [Ying Tan] who works as a teacher to support him. They have a young daughter Yun.
But SuWen is a bit serious for the flighty Wen. She promotes anti-Japanese campaigns and suggests that he should not spend more than he earns.
Mr. Lo feels trapped and falls for the glamorous socialite Li HuiLan (below). Like director Cai he seems more interested in women with cleavage. He divorces SuWen and moves in with HuiLan.
SuWen, as a divorced women, is rejected by her family and has to teach to earn her living. She badly misses Yun of whom Lo has custody.
Soon Lo realises that he does not want to spend all his time out socialising and he starts to use the same arguments on HuiLan that his wife used on him. When he receives a large advance for his novel about his life with HuiLan The Paradise (!), she takes the money and runs off with his friend [the reliably unreliable Zheng Junli]. As the inter-titles tell us, the ‘pink dream’ disappears.
SuWen writes a novel entitled The Cry of an Abandoned Wife and submits it to the publisher in Lo’s name. Realising what has happened, he searches for her everywhere and eventually they are reconciled (but for how long?). The irrepressible Yun closes the film with a song.
It’s a slight enough film but entertaining. Its hard to see it as a serious critique of urban, westernised life since, like several Chinese film of the time, it spends most of its time showing off the glamour of this lifestyle. SuWen is only marginally less westernised than HaiLun and the main message of this film would seem to be that women are the stronger sex even if legally and by custom the weaker.
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