Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Chor Yuen, 1972) (Patreon)

In 2013, avant-garde filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul produced a short film called Mount Song. It consisted of isolated, moonlit village scenes, often covered in patently artificial snow. Open structures with hatched bamboo roofs, and highly organized rows of trees with white blossoms, all vaguely evoke the Qing dynasty, but only as filtered through the haptic imagination of the cinema. Kaul repeatedly shows a mobile camera describing these scenes, with forced perspective turning branches in the foreground into smeary brushstrokes, blocking and intensifying the open spaces of the middleground, where "action," if there were any, would most likely be situated.

Watching Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan provides one of those occasional experiences where a piece of film history is snapped into place, even as you've been aware of all the pieces around it for a very long time. Works by Zhang Yimou, Park Chanwook, Quentin Tarantino, and many others have drawn from this and other Shaw Brothers productions for their narrative shape, dramatic tone, and above all their organization of filmic space as a battleground of incommensurate visual tensions, over-extended like an accordion bellows pulled to the point of rupture. The meticulous mise-en-scene is realistic on its immediate surface, but on close inspection conveys a clean, impenetrable hyper-realism, not unlike the disturbingly well-appointed suburban homes of Douglas Sirk. Everything on screen is electric, radiating an all-over atmosphere of melodrama and decadence.

Specifcally, Intimate Confessions is the story of Ainu (Lily Ho), the young daughter of a rural teacher who is abducted by mercenaries working for Madame Chun (Betty Pei Ti), the gorgeous but diabolical proprietress of the Four Seasons Brothel. All of the women who work there are prisoners, but most of them acquiesce to their servitude fairly quickly. Ainu is different. She fights, protests, tries to starve herself, and near the end of the first act, even hatches an escape plan -- thwarted, of course, by Madame Chun. Ainu's recalcitrance makes her more attractive to the brothel's wealthy clientele, and also to Madame Chun, who embodies the stereotype of the predatory "dragon lady" lesbian, someone who gets off on the power she has over ostensibly weaker women.

Chor Yuen is making a sexploitation film, of course, but uses a formal language that avoids a lot of the overt erotic spectacle Intimate Confessions implicitly promises. Ainu is violently used by the brothel's four richest customers, each in turn. These abuses organize the revenge plot, setting up the dominoes that Ainu will spend the rest of the film knocking down. But Chor uses a dramatic freeze-frame to suspend the film at the very moment each man subdues and violates Ainu. This has the paradoxical effect of preventing us from witnessing Ainu's humiliation while also heightening the dramatic tension of the moment. Like a Freudian approach to trauma, Intimate Confessions halts time so that the psyche can avert the horror to follow.

Having said all that, it would be an error to call Chor's film progressive, much less feminist. What makes it more intriguing is the way it engages with feminist empowerment and an indictment of patriarchy while remaining fully inside the lines of a martial arts exploitation film. Ainu is a prisoner, and the only hope she has of changing her situation is to embrace it absolutely, becoming the most sought-after courtesan in the brothel. This allows her the access to kill her monstrous customers, and to bamboozle Madame Chun, with whom Ainu begins a passionate affair. By succumbing to Chun's advances, Ainu gradually seduces her captor, who believes they are "two women in one body," flesh of each other's flesh.

Some commenters have compared Intimate Confessions to the films of Mizoguchi in terms of their depiction of prostitution as physical and psychological torment, merely the logical endpoint of a society defined by extreme stratification of the sexes. However Chor takes a different tack. By showing Ainu as the student-turned-master, the unbreakable heroine who beats the system at its own game, Intimate Confessions exhibits a more contemporary post-feminist attitude, for better or worse. Where the women of Mizoguchi are tragic victims to the end, Ainu takes abuse until she is in a position to dole it out in turn. Neither option is particularly inspiring as a political program. But as cinema, Intimate Confessions infuses the old rape-revenge scenario with a plasticity and theatricality that is at once distancing and (pardon the pun) disarming.