What always impresses me about Zhang Yimou's *Shanghai Triad* is how the two settings of the film -- the Thirties-era, glitzy nightclub milieu of the gangsters in Shanghai and the pastoral scene in the second half -- are used as a counterpoint to the drama unfolding before us. The settings are glamorous, mythical, beautiful; the people are not.<br /><br />The characters are, in fact, brutally ordinary. Even the ostensible hero of the piece, the 14-year-old boy who becomes the servant of chanteuse Gong Li, is not particularly remarkable: not intuitive, not very smart, and certainly not a winner. Ineffectual to the end, he ends up suspended upside-down like the famed Hanged Man in a deck of Tarot. The plot involving the Thirties-era Shanghai Mafia is mostly presented through the boys' eyes, with the result that the most "action-oriented" events, usually occurring off-screen, seem incoherent and, though violent and tragic, beside the point. The Boss's girlfriend Gong Li obsesses us to the same degree that she devours the boy. All else -- meaning, the plot's wider macrocosm -- remains tangential or dangerously opaque. It turns out that there is plenty enough drama in the day-to-day life of the gangster's moll, played by Gong Li with a seemingly infinite variety: shallow, slutty, heartbroken, tragic, pathetic, whimsical, tender. The poor boy is in a dither. One minute he hates her enough to spit in her tea when her back is turned; the next he smiles at her childish singing like the first fool in love in the history of the world. (By the way, let it be said that I would've had my left ear cut off if given the chance to be Li's boy-servant!)<br /><br />"Miss Bijou" could almost have become a real human being if permitted just a few more weeks on the island. The snotty poisons appear to ooze away from her; the rustic setting puts her back in touch with a girlish freedom, almost forgotten (and hardly suspected by us). In several of Shakespeare's plays, there exists what his critics call a "green world" -- a haven far away from the corruptions of urban life. Zhang permits us brief glimpses of decency that are engendered by this potentially healing "green world", all under the nose of the ruthless crime lord (who is ostensibly there to heal from his knife wound, as well). These glimpses are so powerfully touching that we tend to forget the Boss's evil eminence, and therefore the machinations of the gangsters -- never forgotten by THEM, of course -- intermittently slap us awake.<br /><br />All of which is another way of saying that Yue Lu's cinematography is almost too astonishing for the movie's subject. *Shanghai Triad* is, without question, one of the most beautiful-looking movies of the Nineties, perhaps of all time. But don't let the beauty of the pictures, or Gong Li's physical charms, for that matter, distract you from the preciseness of Zhang's direction. Obliged to commit to the idea of subjective camera placement (that is, generally taking the perspective of the boy), Zhang evinces great subtlety and restraint. For instance, he uses the Steadicam here, but doesn't get carried away with it in order to create some sort of mood or tone, the way Kubrick was prone to do. Zhang knows when to move the camera, and he knows when to keep the damn thing still: it depends on what each scene calls for. Every frame of this film is directed to a specific aesthetic purpose.<br /><br />By the way, this movie makes a natural double-bill with Hou Hsiao-Hsien's *Millennium Mambo*, another exercise in exquisite aesthetics with a plot about a gangster's moll. One wonders if Hou wasn't a bit tainted by the influence of *Shanghai Triad*, despite *Mambo*'s 21st-century setting. Both films are about inarticulate, helpless satellites in a criminal universe who come to depressing ends. Needless to say, these films could only have been made in China or Taiwan, home to a culture more ruthlessly realistic than our sappy civilization. If remade as an American film, the Boss in *Shanghai Triad* would have developed a sentimental attachment to the kid which would inevitably bring his criminal empire crashing down around his head. Imagine the reverse, and you'll get the idea of how THIS film ends.<br /><br />All in all, one of the classics of modern Chinese cinema. 9 stars out of 10.