Ocean Flame

Part devastating love story, part gangster flick, Ocean Flame is a passionate melodrama and the sophomore work by Liu Fendou, an emerging enfant terrible of mainland Chinese cinema. Violently charming and tenderly sado-masochistic, the film defies the gravity of correct gender politics, exposing the fragile side of abuse and melting it into crushing romanticism. After his critically acclaimed debut Green Hat, Liu tests his directorial hand on a smouldering adaptation of Wang Shuo's renowned novel, translating the book's soul into Jean Genet-like visions of fierce beauty. Directing the virgin talents of newcomer Monica Mok, he skilfully plays with the contrasting emotions and different worlds suggested by the film's title. Within the closed perimeter of a few locations – striking, wild beaches or anonymous hotel rooms – a tainted love affair unravels between a petty criminal and a beautiful waitress, their tortured story enclosed in a long, lingering flashback. At the heart of the narrative is Lichuan (Mok), a coffee-shop server who becomes confronted by a hated love, Wang Yao (Liao Fan). An unscrupulous pimp who derives his income by blackmailing his girls' clients in elaborate sex scams, Wang Yao meets Lichuan after he has been beaten up by a gang of rival thugs, her perfect features slowly coming into focus despite the bloody haze caused by his broken nose. It is love at first sight, but the fatal attraction connecting them and the sick, reciprocal addiction to their desperate love will soon have a firm, destructive grip on the couple's soul. Freedom is – ironically – the word that best defines Liu's gritty poetics and the ramshackle underworld they depict. Revelling in the steamy claustrophobia of l'amour fou, his powerful, resolute strokes follow the uneven pace of the protagonists' drive to annihilation in a remarkable fusion of liberated form and content. Traces of Kim Ki-duk and Takeshi Kitano's work can be detected in the exquisite physicality of sex, passion and violence that criss-crosses this story of lethal love. At times brutal yet excruciatingly tender and cutting edge, Ocean Flame confirms Liu's place as China's new spokesman of provocative aesthetics. (From tiff08.ca)