Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Sameeha Pugh It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Anssi Vartiainen The main problem with this Ang Lee period espionage love story is that it drags. With a running time of two and a half hours, yet with a plot that can be summed up with a couple of words, it overstays its welcome sooner or late, depending on the patience of its viewer. It's a fine film by most other measures, but even a good film can turn sour if it simply keeps going and going.The story follows the life of an university student Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei) during the years leading up to and during the World War Two in China. She ends up joining a bunch of other rebellious youths who want to strike back against Japanese oppressors. In this particular case using Jiazhi's sexuality as a weapon against a Chinese collaborator. Good basic idea, but you cannot really see two and a half hours's worth of material in that, can you.Ang Lee is a prolific director for a reason and it shows in this film as well. It is shot beautifully, most of the actors give great performances and the production values are topnotch. Definitely a film to check out if you're a die-hard fan of him.But, it drags. It drags so bad. And that is why I have to rate it as just below average. If you're a fan of films that take their time and allow for a lot of atmosphere and mood buildup, then this is definitely your film. But, if you like your films mostly under or around two hours, you might want to reconsider.

chaos-rampant The exercise here seems to be the layered portrait of a woman (an actress) unsure of herself. There is a lot of other stuff thrown in with Hong Kong and Shanghai in the grip of war, spying and politics, that is basically broadening the canvas with enough life to make the main image more lush and lifelike as opposed to a dry examination, bring clarity to it as something we unearth from a busy world. It is what Wong Kar Wai does in his films when stretching time, though not exactly the same.That image is actually an image of her, shown twice.That is where she's talking on the phone in the cafe, more sensually memorable when moments later she puts on perfume. The first time it happens we know close to nothing of her, except an implied affair with Mr. Lee, stolen from glances like in a Wong Kar Wai film. The second time near the end we know everything, again she talks on the phone and puts on perfume but now everything's changed, we know who both are and what is to be done.In between this mirrored image is the bulk of the film, all that fleshing out of the world and her as memory that shifts our position in the story by shifting what we know of the situation. It drags for me but there's a payoff in the end.Here's very clearly how it works in the film, it's clever stuff. If you have seen just the first part leading up to the phonecall, and the last part resuming from the phonecall until the end, in that part of the story after she has fallen in love, her actions make sense.In that part, Mr. Lee is just a sweet, taciturn man, not unlike the husband Tony Leung played in Mood for Love. Why'd she do it?But you have seen everything else, known him with more depth as an unpleasant man and can't unknow him, unless that is if you excuse the film as erotic. So you question her judgment of allowing herself to be seduced, as do her puzzled comrades in the firing squad line.She an actress, he a watcher.Her initially acting in the theater, later having to act in life, in the mahjong games with rich bored housewives, as the mistress. He watches, cautious at first but steadily drawn in. She is drawn by him watching, later forcing his way into her performance.It's not far from Wong Kar Wai's later films, which go back to Bertollucci's Last Tango to Vertigo (better yet, Nabokov's Lolita), where a man and woman, he is usually older and experienced, create between them a space of obsessive passion, where names and identity dissolve.Lee has done it halfway between Kar Wai and Bertolluci, shifting from coy glances to lots and lots of sex—but if you are fooled by it, you are fooled as she is, seduced because it's erotic.The point in all cases? That space ruled by nameless desire which may seem more pure and sometimes we covet in life, where we won't have to be who we are, is in fact more illusory, desire bents the shape of things into what is desired of them to be. As in a film noir, where desire (coded in the femme fatale) fools with the narrator's reality.On all this topics as well as main story, Lee inserts Hitchcock's film noir Suspicion which our heroine sees in the theater—a film where a young girl wonders whether her charming man may not be a murderer, and a studio tacked-on (meaning false) ending puts her mind at ease.Linked in all cases with memory as the untrustworthy desire to bend the life we choose to recall, it is a purely cinematic subject, where again there's the escape into something more pure than just life, but it's an illusory ecstacy, light poured on canvas. Enchanting for a while, but the lights have to come back on again.So why'd she do it? Because all that she knows about him is abstract when he touches her, the touch is real.So Lee has compromised, in this as in others of his films, it is half a great film in a rather ordinary package. You can kid yourself with the story, whereas not in 2046. But if it leads even one person into likeminded filmmakers who work outside producer constraints, it was all worth it.

kluseba This Chinese movie is a visually stunning drama that convinces with two extremely talented main actors that incarnate two credible and fascinating characters. On one side, you have the charming, naive and shy student Wong Chia Chi who gets coincidentally involved into the resistance movement against Japanese occupation and the Chinese puppet government in Hong Kong back in 1938. She gets introduced to the social circle of Mister Yee's wife in order to approach, then seduce and ultimately trap him. The special agent and recruiter of the puppet government is brutal towards his enemies, emotionally cold and very experienced.Wong Chia Chi becomes Misses Mai and is able to seduce her target but when the resistance movement is ready to get the enemy killed, he moves to Shanghai with his family. The group's plans get discovered and result in a twisted crime after which the organization falls apart and disappears. Four years later, Wong Chia Chi also moves to Shanghai for studies and lives a solitary live in depression and poverty, abandoned by her father and her friends. She meets one of her old partners again who introduces her to an egoistic, pitiless and vengeful undercover agent of the Kuomintang who wants to finish what had begun four years ago. Wong Chia Chi takes the identity of Misses Mai again and soon meets her target on a regular basis. They start to have a relationship that is quite brutal, cold and physical in the beginning but the two solitary souls soon start to develop true emotions towards each other. As the resistance starts to concretely organize the assassination of the target, the matured young woman has to decide which path to choose.The story of this movie is intriguing thanks to a very strong acting and a progressive character development. The film features brutal and cold sex scenes close to a rape but these scenes ultimately get more and more aesthetic and passionate. This radical contrast perfectly portrays both characters and the essence of the movie. In many movies, sex scenes are not very well acted and remain superficial but these ones really make sense, incarnate a certain spirit and feel extremely real as if the two actors were truly in a relationship which is though not the case.The movie is quite slow paced in the beginning and takes some time to kick off which might be difficult for some people but at the same time, this flick gives us a credible portrait of the difficult life during the Second Sino-Japanese War. As it's often the case for contemporary Chinese movies, a lot of budget went into the beautiful costumes, the authentic decorations and the detailed locations. All these elements drown the viewer into a very credible past world and develop a great atmosphere.In the end, any fan of contemporary Chinese movies should check this solid production out. Be sure to view the almost flawless uncensored version that is much more authentic, complex and dynamic than the shortened one.

Tim Kidner Having been a sincere fan of Taiwanese super-director Ang Lee since his superb 'The Ice Storm', I have seen him bravely move from one contentious subject, to another, usually with incredible aplomb.After sweeping the boards with awards for his English language and rightly popular 'Brokeback Mountain', he definitely doesn't rest on his laurels and did not re-make some other short story to the same successful recipe.Only a very brave or suicidal director would come up with a two-and-a- half hour, slow moving war-time epic set in Shanghai, as the follow-up. Listed under both Erotic and Period as well as drama and foreign language, these are not the genres that anyone wanting to make a quick buck would sanely go for. However, whilst stately and often beautiful, it is not one that I sit too happily with and I've just watched my DVD of it for the second time.The story is fairly complex and the first hour is spent setting up the remaining 90 mins. The leads, though are spell-bindingly hypnotic, especially in the often poetic and fluid direction. The music, too, for me, plays a big part, eking out and complimenting the emotions and feeling of the scenes.The erotic tag is justified, though if anyone thinks that it's wall-to- wall sex scenes WILL be disappointed - and wait an awfully long time for when they do. Despite their relative candidness, they are strangely beautiful and Lee has coaxed out that rare thing - intimacy with feeling - in the throws of passion it is possible to see just what each partner is getting from the sex, just from the expression in their eyes: quality stuff. Unfortunately, the sexual violence that precedes all this is difficult to watch and is one of the main reasons why I cannot wholly enjoy, or recommend this film. A pity.Is this a mis-judgement on Ang Lee's part? Possibly not and many do think it a great film of high merit. Having said that, we all have our no-go areas and at the end of the day, no amount of brilliance can wholly redeem a film, or indeed, anything which crosses those boundaries.