Painter Jinian, undergoing eye surgery for wounds received in a bar fight, remembers or imagines his relationships with student journalist Xue and her lesbian lover Yu. On recovering, he sets about trying to write and direct a film about the three of them. His meetings with potential producers, actors and technicians eventually get the project moving, but not quite as he foresaw it. Wang smartly integrates material from society at large (old propaganda movies, a triumphalist TV report on military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, disco arrangements of old Maoist anthems) to build up a front-line bulletin from China's cultural wars of the late 1990s.