After watching nearly 100 minutes of a woman's humiliation and debasement, a viewer may feel nearly as degraded as the protagonist of this nasty descent into celluloid hell. A perverse romance between a brutish criminal and his obsessed lover, Ocean Flame leaves two questions unanswered: why would anyone make such a film, and why would anyone want to sit through it?

Though set in Hong Kong, mainland director-writer Liu Fendou imparts little of the city's feel to the exploits of Putonghua-speaking tough guy Wang Yao (Liao Fan), whose prostitution-blackmail racket affords him plenty of time for other mischief. While trying to shake down a seaside cafe, he is drawn to Putonghua-speaking barmaid Lichuan (Monica Mok Siu-kei). We learn little about her other than her willingness to be dominated by the psychotic Wang. Within hours of their initial meeting the two make passionate love on a beach in a scene embodying the Chinese title, 'half sea water, half flame'.

Wang warns Lichuan that he isn't a nice person, one of the script's few instances of understatement. The two (above) engage in a masochistic relationship that consumes them - and the audience's patience. The material could have been compelling as well as titillating had the main characters been less one-note. From beginning to end of the nonlinear storyline, Wang personifies violence and lust without modulation in intensity or pitch.

There are occasional diversions. The always-reliable Lam Suet is relatively amusing as a rival gangster who pays the ultimate price for trying to horn in on Wang's territory. Simon Yam Tat-wah, the producer, delivers a wordless cameo as a detective on Wang's trail, affording the plot a shred of narrative pertinence. The cinematography by Chen Ying and Chan Chor-keung captures some picturesque sea views. The art direction by Li Yang and Raymond Kwok Siu-keung does an evocative job with Wang's flat, a pre-war abode hard to find in rapidly changing Hong Kong but seemingly popping up in many a local production.

As a scriptwriter of small, personal movies like Shower (1999), Liu brought a degree of wit and insight that is all but absent in Ocean Flame. The source material, incidentally, is a novel by mainland author Wang Shuo that was first brought to the big screen in 1989 by the Beijing Film Studio and radically altered for the 2001 Love the Hard Way, starring Adrien Brody. Neither was a success, a fate Liu's darker approach might have been spared had it gone beyond self-indulgent macho fantasy.

Ocean Flame opens today