... and, like the man said, never ask for whom it tolls. This is alleged to be the 10th version of Les Liasons Dangerouse and I haven't seen any of the previous nine. The main thing I took away from this version was elegance, stateliness, formality. Not unusual of course in a film emanating from the Eastern hemisphere. What it is, in fact, is a Comedy of Manners in top-to-bottom writing and no worse for that. Like most occidentals Asian names don't exactly trip off my tongue so I won't attempt to name the actors who I thought were uniformly excellent. I did find it singular to say the least that the leading man whose prowess at martial arts had been amply demonstrated would turn his back on an opponent who might have been down but was far from out. Although I'm woefully ignorant of Eastern mores I do know enough to realize that Honour is prized above most things and a man who has just spoken about the shame his family suffered at the hands of the leading man is not going to give up until he draws his last breath. It's just about feasible that the leading man wished to die/be killed but in that case why has he just kicked seven kinds of s*** out of his opponent instead of succumbing gracefully to the first blow. Overall it's a chocolate-box of a movie like Marivaux in Mandarin.
Review of Untold Scandal
