Gao has already made a deal with Hsi to invest in a nightclub in Shanghai, but Ying doesn't want him to go.

Throughout the course of the film the unsavory alliance between the underworld and the political elite emerges.

[5] Director Luca Guadagnino also listed it as one of his 10 favorite films in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll.

In two movies since then—Millennium Mambo and Three Times—Hou has cast a sad-eyed gaze upon modern Taiwan.

In all of them, Taiwanese youth are depicted as listless wastrels, addicted to distraction and unmoored from their past.