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Tony Leung Kar-fai tracks his missing expatriate wife (Maggie Cheung) from Hong Kong to New York City, which is depicted simply as an urban sewer in this gratingly arch and pretentious 1990 melodrama, written and directed by the ambitious young director Clara Law (
The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus). Every specific detail of the horrors of New York rings luridly false, and Maggie Cheung, who was just about perfect in Ann Hui's expat heart-tugger
Song of the Exile, embarrasses herself. In fairness, no actress on earth could make something convincingly human out of the character she has been asked to play, a victim whose personality has been split down the middle by the pressures of her icky new environment. One half is a demure Chinese village girl, the other a borderline whore, a role she's forced to assume in order to survive in the Gotham Inferno. As he continues his search, Leung picks up a standard-issue eccentric sidekick, a streetwise, gum-popping Americanized Chinese girl (Hayley Man as a stereotyped punk rocker). The fatal finale (in the shadow of a papier-mâché copy of Tiananmen Square's Goddess of Democracy) is only the most egregious of the movie's overblown symbolic gestures.
--David Chute
