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To me, this movie is perfection.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This was a fabulous movie, instantly making it onto my list of favorites. There was so much going on between the three main characters along with the background of China emerging as a modern nation. The tragic ending brought real tears to my eyes.The story revolves around the household of the Pang family, a very wealthy and traditional clan that lives in the countryside and has remained untouched by the rise of modern society in Shanghai during the 1920's. *** SPOILERS ***Yu Xiuyi is married to the son of the clan elder, Pang An, a cruel opium addict. One day, she sends for her much younger brother, Yu Zhongliang (Leslie Cheung), to come live on the Pang estate and tend to her husband's opium needs while he completes his studies. His playmates become his sister-in-law, Pang Ruyi (Li Gong), and her cousin, Pang Duanwu (Kevin Lin). Zhongliang is turned into a servant and humiliated by his master and his sister. He leaves for Shanghai and hooks up with a crime family there. He seduces married women and the gang extorts money from their husbands. He's a playboy without a heart.Back at the Pang estate, An suffers some sort of brain damage from his opium use, so when the elder dies, his younger sister, Ruyi, is chosen to rule the clan. She chooses her cousin, Duanwu, to act as her counselor, much to the chagrin of the clan elders who see both of them as inexperienced and not traditional enough.Zhongliang's boss sends him back to the Pang estate to seduce Ruyi so that they can extort money from the clan, but when he returns, he soon falls in love with her. Complicating matters, Duanwu, the ever loyal cousin, also is in love with Ruyi.Zhongliang is torn between loyalty to his crime boss, who has become a father figure to him, and his newfound emotions toward Ruyi. Ruyi had despaired of never finding a suitable husband - the marriage arranged for her years ago had been broken when the family found out she was an opium addict like her older brother. The love she and Zhongliang find for each other is liberating for each.Zhongliang begins to feel guilty - members of his gang are pressuring him to set up the extortion. He came back to the Pang estate to exact revenge for what An and his sister did to him years ago, but he's in love with Ruyi and can't go through with his plan. So he leaves and returns to Shanghai, where his understanding boss lets him off the hook, sort of.He is ordered to go through with the extortion of a married women he's been having an affair with, a woman he really loves. The gang boss sends for Ruyi so that she can witness Zhongliang's seduction and betrayal of this woman, hoping this will ruin the love between the two and return Zhongliang to his former cynical self. But the woman kills herself in despair and Zhongliang is destroyed by his guilt.Ruyi returns to the country and is met at her estate by the man whose family spurned their betrothal years ago. He is now a modern, self-sufficient businessman in Shanghai, and after the two get along well, they both decide to get married - he's transitioned to modern life and doesn't care anymore what his family thinks of Ruyi.But Zhongliang returns. Ruyi had thrown herself at him in Shanghai despite finding out what he was really like, and he had been afraid to tell her how he felt, but now he wants to reclaim her. Ruyi tells him she no longer loves him.Zhongliang's sister, jealous and bitter about her isolation and reduction to second class status within the clan, nags him into putting arsenic into Ruyi's opium, something he did years ago to An as part of his revenge. Too late, he regrets his actions and tries to stop her from smoking the poison. She's rendered a vegetable just like her older brother was.As Zhongliang's about to return to Shanghai in deep sorrow, Duanwu guns him down on the pier. And Duanwu, no longer meek and subservient but cruel and decisive, now becomes the head of the clan while Ruyi is carried comatose into the ancestral hall to witness the ceremony.*********The story is terrific and the acting superb. I've seen several of Li Gong's films and this is her best part of all. She portrays innocence and betrayal with great beauty and skill. Leslie Cheung is also terrific in the role of Zhongliang, really the main figure in the film. His character has such depth and complexity, and the actor does a great job of letting the viewer see the pathos within him as he's torn between revenge and love.The cinematography is spectacular. The scenes in the countryside surrounding events in the Pang estate are filmed with a fuzzy aura to them, almost putting events into a dreamlike state. Shanghai, on the other hand, is shot cleanly with defined edges. Christopher Doyle, an Australian, also did the cinematography on several other Chinese films as well as recent entries like "Rabbit-Proof Fence" and "The Quiet American"", another film with stunning visuals.For English speaking cinema fans, don't let the subtitles intimidate you. This is a great film, a beautiful film about a tragic love story, and one you really should see.

Not only the society in China decades ago, but also the current Chinese society. Again, like the movie Farewell My Concubine also directed by Mr. Kaige Chen, this film is also a work of contemporary criticism told in the form of a story happened decades ago.Unlike the story of Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji), what reflected in this film is far too close to home: what happened more than half a century ago is happening again in China and the director was more direct in criticizing the decadence in this film.

This is a depressing, sad, dark, seedy, suspenseful movie full of intrigue, cunning, and deceit. It is a fine work of cinema in the dramatic sense. But, I did not find it to be as sensual as its billing had led me to believe. I expected a more erotic, sensual overtone to some of the story and/or the scenes. But, instead it was a tale laced with opium, betrayal, and desperation in a world that was changing from the old ways of ancient China to the newer ways of the West. I can see why it would have caused such controversy in China in the first place, as the box proclaims. But, I think that words like, "Sensuous," "Steamy," and "Ravishing," were over-used. It was a good story not for the tame of heart or mind. There are many quiet parts of the movie where there is little action and few words. It works well if you have the mindset to pay attention patiently. I think that a film like this will appeal to select audiences and I would be a little weary to recommend it to everyone. I think some people will like this film, others absolutely love it, while others yet may be bored with the slow-moving action and dark dialogues.

When I rented this after reading the pitiful, typically over-sensualized box, I hoped only that it might struggle above tepid mediocrity in some way. In fact, I saw it and despised Leslie Cheung's petty Songlian and his sister Caifei He for the first hour.Yet then I began to realize how intricately woven the characters and plot were as visual symbols began reappearing, and the movie began to happily shirk off introductory pretenses and reveal the forces behind the characters and their actions. Songlian's pettiness began to reveal itself as an intense and justifiable self-hatred, and that of his sister as terrible hopelessness. Meanwhile the others in the movie undergo powerful transformations as well, as we see how people struggle to bring their own beliefs to bear beneath the tidal wave of external circumstances. We see how they fail, and how their failure propogates their weaknesses, undermining others.Overall we see the power of the subversive as it plays on the human mind and heart. We see beliefs destroyed at several levels, we see new beliefs emerge, less pure and more calculating. We see regret unfold in each of the characters, or worse, cold numbness to it from enduring too much.And there is nothing to regret about the movie, except that the subterranean depths of the content make recommendation difficult (this is not a movie for most grandmothers, even though it is still delicate in how it examines its touchier subject matter). Still, it is beautiful in everything it does. The sights, the characters, the transformations, even the twistiness. We rever the characters and their changes, for good or worse because we understand them irrevokably. The movie is highly rich and interwoven. Elements interplay even down to recurring symbols, and by the end we realize that the entire movie is really symbolized in the first ten minutes, even though there is no way we could realize that from the beginning even if told so. Those ten minutes where we see the beautiful Pang estate, and the children, and life so revoltingly innocent at first glance. That is purposeful. What we take for inconsequential initially is proved to be far from it, and really that contrapuntal layering of pretended motive and deeper meaning continues throughout.Every minute in this movie counts. Every side glance reflects meaning. "The Piano" was supposed to be subversive, sensual, touching and powerful, showcasing how the heart must contend with external harshness. However, it is clumsy, ugly, blatant, and ineffectual in comparison to "Temptress Moon" which tells so much more with so much less, and it breaks our heart unspeakably, but is above the painful, selfish bitterness or wallowing found in "Farewell My Concubine", "Raise the Red Lantern", and "Indochine" which really tell stories half as complex (maybe not Indochine). The characters in Temptress Moon are noble, despite and because of their outer twistedness and rent hearts.A sumptuous earring, a swinging lamp, fresh roses, Songlian's longings for Peking, and twisting opium smoke and speeches on its merits and cruelties-- all these symbols snake by at first, yet come to how powerful meaning in the end, and they strike us at many levels in the movie, each time richer with understanding. I left far surprised and impressed. Finally, a movie great enough to express itself in humility of pretenses. If only they'd ditch the stupid and coarsely sensual box.