Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale (1987) begins at what might be the lowest point of Jennifer’s (Cherie Chung) life so far. After two years of saving up, she’s finally moving from Hong Kong to New York City, with plans to study alongside her long-distance boyfriend, Vincent (Danny Chan), and start a life with him. But her arrival is blighted with a series of sobering disappointments. Her discounted apartment lives up to its cost: it’s in a not particularly nice neighborhood; very run down; beneath a subway whose trips make the dusty walls shiver; and, as she’ll almost lethally learn while trying to make some tea in a leaky kettle, susceptible to gas leaks. And when she meets Vincent at the train station, she finds him arm in arm with a woman he’s met since moving overseas. He definitely wanted Jennifer to study abroad, just not necessarily with him, he reasons after he’s caught. Then, perhaps most devastatingly, he quotes Woody Allen mid-breakup: “A relationship is like a shark: it has to move constantly, or it dies.” 

Twenty-three-year-old Jennifer would rather die than not be in a relationship on which she was betting everything. But the distant relative, Samuel (a lovably silly Chow Yun-fat), who’d helped secure her place in the city — he’s the one who picked her up from the airport in his comically dingy car and got her her dilapidated apartment — helps cheer her up. Thirty-three but still boyish and optimistic in a way that suggests someone younger, he and Jennifer get close mostly by goofing off: playing makeshift baseball in an autumn leaves-littered Central Park, wandering around town day-drinking, taking long and ambling walks on the beach, acting as funny and wise older-sibling figures to a little girl Jennifer starts babysitting part-time to cover her rent while she studies. Cinematographers David Chung and James Hayman shoot the film glowily and romantically — the way nostalgic memories might strike us when replayed in our heads.

An Autumn’s Tale could be called a romantic comedy (Jennifer and Samuel are ostensibly far enough apart in the family tree for their connection not to be incestual), though a baseline hallmark is missing: Jennifer and Samuel’s feelings never conventionally come to the fore. They’re only insinuated and kept hidden from each other. One evening together sees Samuel repeatedly try to make a move on the oblivious Jennifer, then, when they part, have him longingly gaze at the ceiling (he lives under her in the same building) in hopes that she’ll stomp on it to signal that she wants him to return. Jennifer makes her feelings known only to relatives in letters sent back home, lamenting that she couldn’t imagine a life without him but that their worlds-apart upbringings and ambitions make her unsure about pursuing anything. 

It’s very 23 of her: still being so seduced by what she thinks she should have — the worldlier, professionally ambitious Vincent — that she undervalues the warmth and kindness shown by the objectively less mature Samuel, who still regularly has bacchanalian nights out and is disposed to gambling when he feels low. In the movie’s purview, the latter instinct is somewhat kindred with Jennifer’s initial uptightness: a trait that the other person will help change for the better. Jennifer and Samuel turn out to need each other. An Autumn’s Tale celebrates love, even if displays of physical affection never manifest, as a vessel for positive change.