Pavilion of Women

In this maudlin soap opera set in 1938, co-writer/producer Luo Yan plays a miserable upper-caste Chinese wife who gives her husband a naive, orphaned peasant girl (Yi Ding) as a concubine for his 50th birthday, then tells him she will never again come to his bed and dares to pursue her own life. It's a powerful concept for a sweeping cultural period epic, but Hong Kong director Yim Ho fails to recognize that the script (based on Pearl S. Buck's novel) is absolutely drowning in clichés and cheap melodrama. Underdeveloped subplots and butcher-shop editing abound while the focus falls mainly on the forbidden romance that slowly develops between Madame Wu (Yan) and an American priest (Willem Dafoe) who runs the local orphanage. The sexual tension between these two is utterly lifeless until they make love on a haystack in a scene so schmaltzy you have to wonder why Ho cast Dafoe as the priest instead of Fabio. Not recommended. (R. Blackwelder)