NOTICE: I do touch on the plot, but not so as to spoil the movie...<br /><br />This long and sensuous movie set in 1942 Shanghai during the Japanese occupation is centered on a beautiful and elegant young woman Wong Chia Chi (played by newcomer Wei Tang) who - with her platonic friend Kuang Yu Min (played by Chinese male hottie Lee-Hom Wang) - is a willing participant in a group of 6 young actor friends who, caught up in a frenzy of nationalism, hatch a naïve plot to kill a powerful and secluded Chinese traitor Mr. Yee (played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai).<br /><br />As you might expect, Wong's part in this plot is to seduce Mr. Yee, and so, this story becomes a sizzling but dark story of a very dangerous affair of lust in the period in Chinese history where revolution is in the air but does not yet have China in its grip. In China's repressed sexual climate, the relationship between Kuang and Wong - for, of course, from the first he loves this dazzling girl – is a sub-plot that stirs in a real sense of pathos. An ominous pall – even a sense of dread - hangs over the entire story, and there is no hint of how it is to end.<br /><br />The story is certainly a thriller and, under Director Ang Lee, it is a gorgeous movie, punctuated with those breathtakingly understated Chinese dresses and perhaps the hottest sex scenes you have ever seen in the movies, but it proceeds at an agonizingly slow pace and is steeped in the Chinese way. As such it will be controversial for Western audiences, but for me, I see this as adding to Ang Lee's mystique as a movie-making magician.