In a competition littered with disasters, few were as grave as this extravagant period piece by the director of Suzhou River. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Zhang Zi Yi stars as Ding Hui, a young Chinese woman who fights Japanese occupiers in ’30s Shanghai while harbouring a secret love for Itami (Toru Nakamura), a handsome Japanese agent. Into this mess comes Szeto (Liu Ye), an ordinary man who is mistaken for an assassin after he is inadvertently involved in a bloody gun battle at a train station. Lou Ye fills the first hour of Purple Butterfly with endless handheld shots of his actors smoking and staring into space. However pretentious, they are still preferable to the grandiose set pieces, which combine Richard Attenborough-style pageantry with Peckinpah-calibre violence. Some Asian critics defended Ye’s film with the reverse-racist accusation that Western critics were confused by the murky plotline because of their inability to tell the actors apart. But even savvy gweilos will be frustrated by this mess.

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