Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan

A good looking production, but a rather embarrassed cross between archetypal kung-fu and the sex film. Set in medieval China, the plot involves the Lesbian head of an exclusive brothel who hires a gang of louts to kidnap likely young girls, who are then broken in and sold off to a series of more or less geriatric local officials with inflated ideas of their own desirability. Our heroine, a young teacher, even undergoes multiple rape, almost entirely in reaction shots and freeze frames; in fact almost everything is filmed in reaction shots, whose over-familiarity just makes this comic strip fable that much more ridiculous. Women with any kind of consciousness, however, will be interested in the superbly acted 'false' ending in which the two women are reconciled - hastily followed, of course, by the hugely predictable 'real' climax.