Director Chen Kaige won acclaim with his 1993 film Farewell My Concubine, thanks to its effective melding of personal, historical, and political concerns, as well as its combination of Western and Eastern filmmaking conventions. With Temptress Moon, Kaige takes the cultural exchange one step further—he uses classic Hollywood techniques to create one of the most stunning-looking, if self-consciously showy, films in some time—but unfortunately forgets to bring along a story worth telling. While clarity eventually presents itself, Temptress Moon joins the ranks of Dune and other movies that somehow manage to become nearly incomprehensible within their first five minutes. Chinese superstars Leslie Cheung and Gong Li play would-be lovers between world wars, who are held back by, among other things, her opium habit and his incestuous past and current job as a gigolo blackmailer. Though Kaige explores the operatic familial saga in occasionally tortuous detail, the story never really takes off, giving the film a distractingly detached tone and allowing it to achieve the almost impossible accomplishment of making gangsters, drugs, sex, angry concubines, '20s fashions, and brain-damaged patriarchs seem dull. While the visuals are overwhelming, they would be put to better use underscoring a more involving film.