Adapting Eileen Chang’s brief and vertiginous story, Ang Lee returns to China through its reverse side — that of secrecy, betrayal, and desire caught in the snares of History. The film furthers the ambiguity of the original text: eroticism, patriotism, passion and manipulation all merge, until what separates the mask from the truth is rendered unreadable. Where the writer probed politics through the intimacy of women, Lee films the body as a moral battlefield — a place of dizziness where the act of love turns back upon itself. Within the suffocating refinement of occupied Shanghai, Ang Lee deploys a mise-en-scène of porosity: every scene oscillates between shrewdness and surrender, between control and excess, as if cinema itself were yielding to what it sought to contain. The result is all the more tragic.
Jérôme Baron
This film is not recommended for young audiences (under 12)
Some scenes may be disturbing to viewers
