Red Rose, White Rose

Stanley Kwan, director of the sublime Rouge and Actress, has adapted the most famous Chinese account of the war between men and women, a novella by the late Eileen Chang, preserving every ounce of the book's irony and sarcasm. In pre-communist Shanghai a western-educated man (Chao) runs away from his torrid mistress (Chen, never better) and marries a traditionally submissive girl (Yip)...and proceeds to turn her into a neurotic wreck. Easy to imagine Fassbinder liking this story, and he'd have loved the way Chris Doyle's hallucinatory cinematography accentuates the plot's twists of the knife.