Temptress Moon

In the twenties the Pang family, living in a large estate outside Shanghai, is sunk in opium. Ruyi, the daughter of the house, is the one who feeds the opium to her father and her brother and is kept like a servant. Zhongliang came into the household when his sister married into it, was treated with contempt as a boy, ran away to Beijing and became a man who seduces married women and extracts money from them by blackmail. When Ruyi is put at the head of the family, the gang he works for sends him back to charm her and take the property. While carrying out the job his childhood feeling returns, and the further the plan goes the less clear it is who is using whom. After Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige again brought Leslie Cheung and Gong Li together. The film competed at Cannes and met a divided response, with the complexity of the storytelling drawing a great deal of criticism. Against that, Christopher Doyle's photography and the closed, heavy air of the estate remain its strongest quality.