Dangerous Liaisons (Wi-heom-han gyan-gye)
When I saw that Chinese filmmakers produced a new version of Dangerous Liaisons, I was
intrigued because I remember the version done so long ago staring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer. I liked it then and I enjoyed this Chinese-language version when I watched it last night. It stars Cecilia Cheung, Dong-gun Jang, and Ziyi Zhang.
The setting is a gilded-era 1931 Shanghai, with a westernized upper class dwelling in splendor, while storms of war and revolution gather in the distance. Playboy Yifan Xie is a notorious ladies' man. But he never stops thinking of glamorous Jieyu Mo, who wed into riches and inherited her businessman-husband's corporation when he died. "Miss Mo" has been Xie's on-off lover of longstanding and seemingly his dragon-lady amoral match in every way.
She agrees to surrender to Xie sexually if he succeeds in heartlessly wooing and bedding a chaste widow (Zhang Ziyi). And, to give herself a comparable challenge, Miss Mo takes an assignment to destroy the star-crossed love blossoming between an artist from the Shanghai lower classes and a teenage heiress already promised to wealth in an upcoming arranged marriage. Without saying more, it should be evident where things are heading, and they do not end well.
I strongly recommend this well-done, beautifully-done movie.