Although it′s based on a century-old novel by Han Ziyun (as ′translated′ into modern Chinese by Eileen Chang), Hou′s new film is less a literary adaptation than a distillation of a vanished world with its own language, etiquette and morality. Shot entirely in the studio, it′s set in the ′flower houses′ clustered in Shanghai′s British Concession, a magnet for Qing Dynasty civil servants and their hangers-on, who were prohibited from visiting brothels in the Chinese-administered part of the city. Since most of these men were married (early arranged marriages were still the norm), they patronised the flower girls less for sex than for the thrills of courtship and romance. Maintaining an exquisite formal control (with one crucial exception, every scene is shot in a single take), Hou organises the film around two strands of plot. In one, bureaucrat Wang (Tony Leung) angrily breaks with the flower-girl Crimson after catching her with another lover. In the other, a veteran roue and a cynical flower girl conspire to profit from covering up the scandal of an attempted double-suicide. Wonderfully sensual, the film elegantly deranges the viewer′s sense of time: the world it shows seems timeless and unchanging, but the narrative delivers a series of shocks which tell us how much is changing - and how time is running out. (Tony Rayns)