Chen Handong is the successful son of a wealthy family. He hides his homosexuality and meets up regularly with youngsters from the underworld. Among them is Lan Yu, an architecture student who grew up in the countryside. They embark on a passionate relationship that clashes with the socio-political context, marked by the Tian'anmen Square protests and the emergence of AIDS in the late 1980s.
Through this romance, Stanley Kwan skilfully captures all the fluctuations in love that drive these two men. The director's staging is both harsh and delicate, meticulously describing the messiness of love. His film is both carnal and poetic, where beauty lies in the emergence of desire and tenderness within a couple who, despite the political and social turmoil of post-Mao China, never stop loving each other.
