This melancholic, brooding romantic thriller stars Zhang Ziyi (HERO; CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON) as Ding Hui, a Chinese woman who is part of a secret anti-Japanese terrorist organization in 1931 Shanghai. Three years earlier, under her real name, Cynthia, she was a factory worker in Manchuria carrying on a romance with a Japanese man named Itami (Toru Nakamura) who has since become head of Japan's Shanghai branch of the secret service. As Japan and China prepare to go to war, Itami and Cynthia are doomed to face off against each other. Meanwhile, an innocent couple gets caught in the crossfire during a train station shootout, and the grief-stricken survivor, Szeto (Ye Liu), becomes a double agent in the war between the Chinese and Japanese spy groups. PURPLE BUTTERFLY is all about mood: lots of lingering close-ups of characters sulking in the rain, smoking lots of cigarettes in squalid rooms, or dying slowly from bullets lodged near the heart. The film's dreamy romance, restless handheld camerawork, and nonlinear plot recall the films of Wong Kar Wai, and fans of that director's work should be similarly seduced by this elegant Asian period film noir. A mesmerizing score by Jörg Lemberg helps the disparate pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
