The sexy dot.

Chinese movie promoters have discovered the allure of punctuation. An article in The Beijing News last weekend looked at a number of recent arthouse films that have dressed up their titles with dots, periods, and bars, and asked whether there was any deeper meaning or if it was all for show.

The center dot is probably the most common example of the phenomenon. According to point 4.14 of the national standard "Use of Punctuation Marks," the mark is used as a word separator in transliterations of foreign-language names. It also separates title from chapter in book citations. There are other common uses, such as separating month from day in the names of date-based events like the September 18 Incident (九·一八事件), but it's really not intended to be used to separate random characters.

But sometimes you just have to break the rules. The 2005 musical Perhaps Love was known as 如果·爱 ("if·love") in Chinese. According to director Peter Chan, the dot lends the Chinese title a sense of "perhaps," symbolizing the leading lady's hesitation over her choice between the two male leads.

Perhaps a dot would be nice.

This choice of punctuation was also highlighted in the film's promotional campaign. At right is part of a screengrab from the movie website (available at the Wayback Machine). The dot is a meaningless addition to the menu options: "What's New" is 新·消息, "Video Clips" is 看·片段, and "Behind Love" is 舞台·后.

Other films that have borrowed the cachet of the center dot include Jay Chou's Secret (不能说的·秘密). TBN reports that the Taiwan distributor said the dot was inserted "purely to look good" (and follows that with a snarky remark about Jay's concern with his image). Johnny To's Oscar contender, Exiled (放·逐) makes use of the dot, as does Chun-Chun Wong's Wonder Women (女人·本色).

The trendy period.

The Longest Night in Shanghai (夜。上海) favored the period over the dot, but like the rest of the movie, the title punctuation was widely seen as being all style and no substance. Here's TBN's account:

In the first half of the year, Vicki Zhao's Longest Night in Shanghai is a typical example. This movie was directed by the mainland's most stylish movie director, Zhang Yibai, and it was set in stylish Shanghai. However, when asked about the meaning of period in the title, Zhang said frankly, "It doesn't have any meaning. It just looks good." But during promotion for the film, the period was suddenly discovered by the distributors, and Zhang responded to reporters' questions with this: "'Night' (夜) and 'Shanghai' (上海) are two nouns, so dividing them with a period means that the first one is the time of the story, and the second one is the place. It also provides a way to distinguish the film from the song 'Shanghai Night' [made famous by Zhou Xuan]." Zhang Yibai said that most of the movie names that use punctuation do so because it looks good. He guesses that the trend will continue for a while.

A divider between lust and caution.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution innovates further with the use of a vertical bar: 色|戒. Here's the story behind that choice:

In 1950, when Eileen Chang finished the story Lust, Caution, she wanted to separate the two characters in the title. At first she wanted to put a period in between, which would imply 戒色 [a reversal of the characters, meaning "abstinence" or "celibacy"]. The publisher used a comma, which it had put to use a separator in the past. In 1983, when the story was included in the collection Frustration (惘然记), the title used was the one with the comma. However, the version with the dot was used in an edition issued this year by Writers Publishing House. Eileen Chang scholar Chen Zishan confirmed that there should be a comma between "lust" and "caution."

When the movie posters for Lust, Caution were being finalized, Ang Lee replaced the comma between the two characters with a separating line. He felt that it captured Eileen Chang's original meaning: "Adding this symbol makes these two characters into a book. The first page is 'lust,' the second is 'caution'; or the first is 'caution' and the second is 'lust.' To me, 'lust' is perception and 'caution' is reason. There's something of a dialectic here."

Unfortunately, despite Ang Lee's detailed explanation, he was unable to prevent the public and the media from writing the movie's title with a comma or without any punctuation whatsoever. Logically, the title on the poster should determine the name of the movie; it is a separate work of art from Eileen Chang's original Lust, Caution.

The mistake is compounded by the fact that 色戒 (without the comma or bar) is the Chinese name of Samsara, Pan Nalin's art film about the spiritual journey of a monk who is seduced by Christy Chung.

In addition to the vertical separator, there's one other aspect of the movie poster's layout that's typographically interesting. The movie's title reads right-to-left, as was conventional at the time in which the movie takes place.

However, all of the text on the poster—from the taglines to the cast list—reads left-to-right. So the natural reading for the title line is also left-to-right, in which case it means "abstinence," just as Eileen Chang originally intended.