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The film is a trilogy with 3 unrelated stories, each from a different director, about erotic desire. The first segment, "Hand", directed by Wong Kar-wai, is the most comprehensible one among the three. Though made under expressionism through Wong's typical stylistic cinematography (also with Christopher Doyle as the director of photography), the segment comes with a complete and decipherable chain of beginning, progression and ending of an unfruitful love. Wong carries on with his style and mood as they are in "In the Mood for Love" (2000) without surrendering his beloved use of visual / musical motifs and diegetic songs. This time the underlying ideology of his segment as visually shown by Miss Hau (Gong Li)'s seduction on tailor Zhang (Chang Chen) is no less striking than his "Happy Together" (1997). Although Wong's segment is ideologically seductive, it is visually most covert among the 3 segments that it does not come with nudity.

In "Equilibrium", the second segment, under the directorship of Steven Soderbergh, colour and B/W sequences are used to denote different renditions of reality: saturated blue (setting) for the dream of Nick (Robert Downey Jr.); a realistic colour for the reality and B/W for the dramatic psychiatric treatment sequence. Soderbergh uses the cast shadows of the window shades to visually signify the psychological status of the 2 characters. The shadows of the shades are only shown on the patient, Nick at the beginning of the sequence. These shadows are also shown on the psychiatrist (Alan Arkin) when his stealth behaviour is revealed in the later part of the sequence. This segment is the least comprehensible and comes with profile nudity of the upper part of a woman. Most spectacularly, Soderbergh finely uses 2 levels of contending focuses (forces that divert the attention of the audience to different visual/audio focuses) in the same shot in the treatment sequence: (1) between the staging of the 2 characters and (2) between their staging and dialogues.

"The Dangerous Thread of Things" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni is the last segment. The theme of this segment is loaded with a hue in meaning and philosophy in human concourse in terms of love and sex, purporting to suggest an unanswered comparison between love without sex and sex without love. The mise-en-scenes show minutiae of characters' action in details and females' full frontal nudity. Staging and the spatial distance of the characters in the segment are carefully choreographed to connote alienation. It also comes with sex sequences.

The 3 segments form a progression from an unattainable love and restrained sex (in "Hand"), through the muddled meditation of nudity overtly connoting lust and sex (in "Equilibrium"), to the actualization of sex in an improvised manner. The degree of nudity and expression of sex increases from the first segment to the last segment. From the title and order of the 3 segments, it appears that the wizardry of Antonioni is that meditation is the equilibrium in human love and sex.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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