Without our realizing what is happening, this singularly sly film gradually evolves from sex farce to cautionary tale underlined by increasingly dark humor. Augustine than we would have ever suspected. No sooner has the handsome, rakish Mei Yang awakened his beautiful but comically reluctant bride, Yuk Heung Amy Yip , to the pleasures of sex than he abandons her for a life of determined womanizing. Thus armed, however, he succumbs to sex so compulsively that a day of reckoning could be lurking ahead--also for his having treated his wife with such total neglect. Its heavy-duty sensuality, however, cannot distract us from the cruelty and decadence of its era--a time when women were chattel without recourse to brutal husbands, when their only hope of self-defense was beauty combined with formidable sexual wizardry. As a director, Mak must have a remarkable capacity for inspiring a trust in his actors that would permit them to appear in one uninhibited scene after another; to his credit, he never makes fools of them--and he furthermore gets terrific performances from them in the most potentially embarrassing situations.