From the director of Brokeback Mountain comes this intensely erotic spy thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai in World War Two. Wong is a beautiful and intelligent young girl who, left by her father in Hong Kong in 1939, joins a theatre group that performs patriotic plays. Recruited by the resistance through the group, Wong is chosen to seduce the police chief Mr. Yee, a powerful and hated collaborator, by assuming the role of a bored housewife in order to assassinate him. The plan goes disastrously wrong, yet in 1942 in Shanghai Wong is again set to the task of ensnaring Yee. By this point the dynamic between the two has changed dramatically and their sexual encounters, fueled by tension and mutual suspicion, become darker as a kind of sadomasochistic dependency develops between them. Clever cinematography conveys both the atmosphere of Shanghai as well as graphically portraying the passion and physical intimacy that occurs behind closed doors. This story of sex, deception and emotional cruelty resembles a chess game rather than a love story as the two main characters circle each other in the increasing awareness of the danger inherent in a union they are unable to resist.