Butterfly, the second feature film from Hong Kong arthouse director Yan Yan Mak (and based on a Taiwanese short story), has been getting a lot of buzz on the international film festival circuit for the last year or so. It's won oodles of awards and been nominated for oodles more. Though it will probably find itself with some sort of limited arthouse run in North America at some point, it's been recently released as a nice two disc special edition in Hong Kong with no region coding which makes it compatible with DVD players world wide.

The film follows a woman named Flavia (Josie Ho) who is a schoolteacher in her mid thirties. She's married and has a family now but when she was younger she had a very passionate lesbian affair with Jin (Stephanie Che). The more she thinks back on this ordeal, the more she realizes that her marriage is oppressing her and preventing her from really and truly being herself. One day while out grocery shopping, Flavia runs into a musician named Yip and old longings for Jin are reawakened.

Yan Yan Mak does a fine job of pacing the film by flashing back to the women's younger days and contrasting them to how they've grown up into adulthood. This gives an interesting look at the way that Flavia, who did truly love Jin when she was younger, denied her true feelings and yearnings and went the traditional route – get married, get a job, raise a family, etc.. When her old feelings re-imerge, she transforms like the butterfly of the title and comes out of her cocoon so to speak, lending the title it's significance. It is through the flashback scenes that we come to realize how destiny seems to be working on the two women from the very start, and how Flavia seems to have been, until recently at least, fighting that very same destiny.

Performances are very solid all around. Josie Ho (The Twins Effect) does a fine job in her role, playing it with just enough genuine confusion as to her real identity to be a legitimately sympathetic character. Her teenage counterpart does a fine job in the flashback scenes as well. Stephanie Che steals the show as Jin, lending some real life to he performance that raises the film up a notch or two. Both of the ladies are quite believable in their roles

The color scheme used in the film plays a big part in the success of the atmosphere that the filmmakers are able to create. Subtle tones of primary reds, greens and blues coat much of the picture and give it an unusual quality that perfectly fits the storyline.

The main flaw with the film is that at one hundred and twenty nine minutes it tends to feel overly long in a few parts. When it's on, it's on and it proves to be not only a fine dramatic movie but also an interesting character study (though often those two things do go hand in hand) but a couple of scenes in the middle part of the film drag just a little bit. It's a minor complain though, and Butterfly certainly gets a lot more right than it gets wrong.

Video:

Panorama's 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is very nice. While there is some noticeable edge enhancement pretty much throughout, print damage is never a problem nor is mpeg compression. Some faint shimmering is noticeable in a few scenes but the colors are nice and strong and the image is clean and clear with a nice, high level of detail.