Veteran Hong Kong director Ann Hui creates a long, demanding, intriguing biographical portrait, in a work that combines a quietly disruptive narrative style with a beautiful, austere production design and a kind of stoic grace. Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) plays its central figure, the writer best known under her pen name Xiao Hong, who died in 1942 in her early 30s after a life of great hardship. Her lyrical, personal fiction has only come to be appreciated in recent years. The film is Hong Kong's entry for best foreign film for the forthcoming Academy Awards

The film opens, disconcertingly, with the figure of Xiao announcing the dates of her birth and death, direct to camera; there are also times when figures from the story turn briefly into talking heads, commenting on the person they knew as if they were in a documentary.

And the drama itself, the story of Xiao's bleak life during a time of extraordinary upheaval, is depicted in elliptical, almost calculatedly low-key terms; sometimes it is expository, sometimes it uses Xiao's semi-autobiographical fiction as narrative, and it often feels as if Hui is creating fragments from a writer's journal to tell the story of a life - often glancing incidents, underpinned by a distinctive use of space, place and angle. It's an indirect, slanted way of evoking her fiction.

There are moments when Hui and scriptwriter Li Qiang explicitly indicate that there is doubt about what happened at a certain point, and we see two different versions of events. On other occasions, things are left ambiguous, dangling.

One of the central threads running through the film is her tormented, on-and-off relationship with a fellow writer Xiao Jun (Feng Shaofeng): it ebbs and flows as the political circumstances in China change. Some writers are shown as activists, political figures, party stalwarts; Xiao, to the last, remains stubbornly committed to her art.