Ghosts of Memory: Fleur as Cultural Residue in Stanley Kwan’s Rouge

Abstract

This essay interprets Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (1987) as a cinematic meditation on queer temporality, cultural memory, affect, and the end of colonial Hong Kong. Through the ghostly presence of Fleur-a ghost-courtesan hovering between the 1930s and 1980s-the film stages the city’s encounter with the onset of modernity, amnesia, and the dissolution of affective and cultural continuity. Influenced by Ackbar Abbas’s theory of déjà disparu and Helen Leung’s notion of queer undercurrents, the analysis argues that Rouge remaps the melodramatic ghost story into allegory for Hong Kong’s “politics of disappearance”, in which memory can only persist in the form of performative traces. Close reading of the critical scenes elucidates how Kwan’s metacinematic mise-en-scène, non-linear temporality, and symbolic lighting create a hauntological site through which love, performance, and identity converge. Lastly, Fleur is no figure of supernatural terror but a haunting persistence of cultural and affective truth-a ghost of memory that sustains Hong Kong’s affective complexity in the face of historical oblivion.