Welcome to Destination Shanghai

Cheng's follow-up to Shanghai Panic is more conventionally structured and edited but no less provocative in its account of the fall-out from the moral atom bomb that has hit Shanghai. It follows a number of loosely interwoven lives: a cocky young man who fancies his chances as a gigolo, but ends up working as a male whore; a faded would-be diva who gets a second chance working as a 'cosmetic surgeon'; a young woman whose foray into prostitution leads to her death; a gay man (Cui, pioneer of Queer Chinese Cinema) who married a woman after the Cultural Revolution to help her get back to the city, but abandoned her as soon as she had their child; and the withdrawn, disturbed son of this marriage of convenience. Realising that he's flirting with melodrama, Cheng divides the film between documentary-style scenes and stylised theatrical tableaux, linking the two with digitally manipulated images of the city. The black humour of the early scenes gradually shades into a delicate melancholy as the film consolidates its analysis of China's new sexual economy.