Chu Yuan is often credited with injecting surrealism and mystery into the Mandarin martial arts film of the 1970s. Imagine relocating the martial arts school to a brothel, transposing the martial arts master to the brothel's madam and the disciple to a prostitute who must be forcibly drilled in the arts of servicing men. Imagine also that the madam is a lesbian who abducts virgins to work in her establishment; that she both exploits and is genuinely in love with her protégée; and that the protégée only fakes subservience while secretly seeking bloody revenge….The slain and dismembered are almost all men. “Perversity” meets swordplay, and the result is, as Tony Rayns called it, “pulp poetry.”

Intimate Confessions is repeated Thursday, May 15, in the series Heroic Grace.