When a Beijing businessman, with a compartmentalized view of love and sex, embarks on an affair with a much younger, idealistic student, he's forced to re-examine his morals and beliefs in Lan Yu, a haunting love story from director Stanley Kwan.

Chen Handong (Jun Hu) is an established banker with a comfortable set of morals that define his lifestyle, which is controlled by his need to exit any relationship before seriousness sets in. Enter Lan Yu (striking Liu Ye), a fresh-faced and innocent architecture student from the country with little or no romantic or sexual experience, and the two mismatched men embark on a love affair that is, by turns, sexual, emotionally detached, loving and tragic. Cash and convenience initially define their relationship, but what begins as a one-night stand over time turns into a love affair that tests their limits.

As time passes, the two men drift apart and back together. Hangdong prospers in his business and Lan Yu continues at school. They live together, break up and reunite. Chen Hangdong enters into a marriage of convenience that drives the two apart. Lan Yu goes on with his life until they meet again some time later. When Handong is arrested on corruption charges, Lan Yu comes to the rescue. But then fate steps in and the film charts the final and bittersweet stages of their relationship with great sensitivity.

I was impressed with Lan Yu's leisurely, absorbing pace and use of frank sexuality to tell its story. It doesn't have the urgent desperation of another great, gay Asian love story, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together. But it does have a firm grasp on its two characters, and it's successful at painting a picture of a middle-aged man whose entire life is unexpectedly called into question by the gradual developments of love and commitment.

The movie works on the strength of its two central performances as well as being a sometimes-moving evocation on love, sex, politics and relationships. There's joy in the film, but it's diffused with sorrow, the kind that can only exist hand in hand; bitter with sweet, good with the bad.

The film is compelling as it moves back and forth between Chen Handong and Lan Yu, charting their personal changes, perspectives, needs and goals, and how they manage to ultimately navigate their often radically different perspectives and still maintain a life together against a rather turbulent Chinese society of 1988.

Lan Yu, though a minor film, is an important film in its own way, a small but finely observed tale of a closed-off man who, for a brief time, abandons his rigid and morally questionable ethics in favor of experiencing true love.

Kwan brings an understated dignity and low-key, straightforward approach to the material, preferring to stand back technically and allow his considerable skill with actors carry the day in Lan Yu. The explicit material is risky and in Kwan's hands, rewarding. Lan Yu is a compelling film that begins on a note of cheap sex, and by the end has come full circle with its questions of fate, inevitability and responsibility that is hard-won through real feelings and loyalty.