Drenched in melancholy and regret, Dream Lovers is the kind of movie that drives the well-balanced amongst us into a deep depression.Chow Yun-fat plays a conductor of classical music who returns to Hong Kong as the toast of the town after spending years overseas with his fiance. The two buy an apartment and settle in as young people with a future. Before they can even move in the furniture, Chow Yun-fat becomes possessed by visions and dreams of Brigitte Lin (who isn't?) finding himself hypnotically drawn to the exhibition of terra cotta warriors recently excavated from the Qin Emperor's grave. His fiance can only stand by and wonder what's up.

What's up? Reincarnation. Chow and Brigitte are reincarnated Qin Dynasty lovers who were brutally, lethally, separated thousands of years in the past. They're back together again and lord help any mortal who gets in their way. The damage in this movie starts psychic, and quickly becomes physical as wrists are slashed and minds are broken by the black past boiling up into the present.

With an explicit eye for sexual conduct and a feel for modern relationships only slightly less painful than an autopsy, director Tony Au maps out the destruction these two do without flinching. Watching mortal concerns slough off in the face of bloody history is as painful as a car wreck, and Chow Yun-fat and Brigitte Lin underplay the high drama, both in the present day and in the flashbacks to their previous lives, making what they do that much more painful.

The Qin Dynasty was the first to unify China, and compared to their hard-edged world us modern folk are a bunch of marshmallows. Watching this movie is like watching a boulder roll over a dozen eggs, leaving a smeary mess behind. The boulder is the Chinese past, the eggs? Hong Kong.

by Grady Hendrix