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No. 7 Cherry Lane
Movie

No. 7 Cherry Lane

2019 • Unknown

Woke Score
5
out of 10

Plot

Set in Hong Kong in 1967 — a time of complex politics when it was still a British colony — No. 7 Cherry Lane revolves around a love triangle between a university student, a single mother and her teenage daughter.

Overall Series Review

No. 7 Cherry Lane is an adult animated drama set in 1967 Hong Kong, focusing on a complex and sensual love triangle between a young university student, Ziming, and his student, Meiling, and her mother, Mrs. Yu. The narrative is heavily stylized and dense with literary and cinematic allusions, creating a mood of lush, dreamy nostalgia. The political turbulence of the time, marked by pro-Mao, anti-British demonstrations, serves as a backdrop—a mere 'disturbance' to the central characters' lives of art, desire, and intellectual pursuits. The film's primary focus is on exploring themes of longing, aging, and a deeply felt sense of a lost golden era for Hong Kong. It contains numerous explicit and surreal sexual fantasies, including prominent homoerotic sequences that define the atmosphere of the main character's desirability and the film's overall tone. The pacing is deliberately languid, prioritizing a hyper-aesthetic, often mystifying, portrait of adult desire over a clear plot or political message.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics2/10

The narrative does not center on an intersectional lens or privilege. Character conflict is purely personal and erotic, not based on immutable characteristics or systemic oppression. The casting is historically authentic for the Hong Kong setting, and the local political turbulence is kept secondary to the core drama of personal desire.

Oikophobia1/10

The film is an explicit 'romantic paean' and work of 'pure nostalgia' dedicated to the director's memory of 1967 Hong Kong, framed as a beautiful, lost 'golden age.' This perspective is a celebration of home culture and heritage, directly contradicting the deconstruction of heritage or civilizational self-hatred.

Feminism4/10

Mrs. Yu is portrayed as a 'liberated and attractive woman' and 'entrepreneur,' who is 'not a motherly type,' which subtly pushes against the celebration of traditional roles. The female lead's personal fulfillment is found outside the nuclear family structure and traditional motherhood, but the male lead, Ziming, is a highly desirable, sensitive intellectual, not a bumbling or toxic figure.

LGBTQ+9/10

The film explicitly centers alternative sexualities and non-normative desire. The male protagonist is lusted after by men and women alike, and the plot includes multiple prominent and sexually explicit homoerotic scenes, such as two men showering together while being peeped on, and a surreal sexual fantasy involving the male lead and another boy. This focus places a non-traditional sexual identity at the heart of the film's atmosphere and artistic vision.

Anti-Theism7/10

The movie operates in a purely secular and subjective moral space. The entire narrative focuses on sensuality, desire, and fantasy as life's central concern, implying a reality without objective, transcendent truth. Traditional religion is ignored entirely, and the story’s highly subjective moral landscape is defined by personal longing and emotional experience.