| Summary: | Love after Love, a film directed by Xu Anhua based on “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”, became a contentious adaptation of Eileen Chang’s novella soon after its wide release. Many audiences contend that the adaptation is not a faithful one while omitting the inherent features of a film medium and the successful addition of newly invented plots. This essay thus commits itself to analyzing the film’s merits and demerits through a detailed comparison between the movie and Chang’s original text. The analysis is carried out respectively in the aspects of scene settings, characterization and the revelation of the theme. The essay concludes by maintaining that the film succeeds in restoring and making full use of the scenes in the novella, as well as constructing one major figure, while it bears its weaknesses in building another character of equal importance and revealing the ultimate theme of “the fall of sobriety” in Chang’s work. Overall, Love after Love is admittedly not a faultless cross-media adaptation, yet it should not be totally repudiated, either.
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