ABSTRACT
By the 1990s writings had emerged in Chinese societies that looked to openly address women’s attitudes toward sexual pleasure, reversing many traditional literary and cinematic narrative trends where, as Dyer notes:
Such narrative drivers have long been present in film as well. In the case of China such structures have been replicated, with Croll quoting one writer’s observations that:
This repression of pleasure is found in the complex sexual relations between the protagonists in Lost in Beijing (Pingguo [lit. Apple] 2007, dir. Li Yu). Fan Bingbing’s Liu Pingguo (hence, the Chinese title) is unceremoniously raped by her boss, Lin Dong (Tony Leung Ka-fai), serving only to gratify his base pleasures. Lin’s indiscretion is found out though, and as a form of revenge his wife, the ‘older woman’, Wang Mei (Elaine Jin), seduces Pingguo’s hapless husband An Kun (Tong Dawei), using him entirely for her own sexual pleasure in an extended scene that focuses on her face as she has sex with him, where it seems any sexual pleasure is secondary to the pleasure of revenge.
