Stanley Kwan′s first feature since he came out as gay in his documentary Yang +-Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema is a piercing account of love in a time of uncertainty - the time in question being 1997, the year of Hong Kong′s return to China′s sovereignty. Ah Moon (played by former sexpot Chingmy Yau) is a businesswoman who dies in a plane crash en route to Taiwan; her computer-nerd husband Fung Wai, more numbed than grief-stricken, stumbles into a non-sexual friendship with the gay estate agent who offers to help him sell his apartment. Rose (also played by Cingmy Yau) is another Hong Kong businesswoman, a few years older and wiser than Ah Moon; she has left her husband and moved to Taipei to open a boutique. The film′s plots turn on the fact that both women make the acquaintance of Jie a rootless young drifer from Taiwan who is briefly Ah Moon′s lover but seems secretly more interested in her husband... Through characters who oscillate between commitment and infidelity, marriage and divorce, true friendship and casual sex, kwan offers a very personal reflection on emotional anxieties shared by many of his generation. Probably his only mistake was to ask an English critic to appear in a cameo role. (Tony Rayns)