Despite the rather slick looking trailer with its heavy use of CGI, this is actually a rather low-key, character-driven movie. Daniel Wu plays a computer programmer working on a computer game featuring a digital character (female, of course) - he dislikes his company's approach (stitching together what the geeks believe is the perfect female) and when he runs into a plain-looking but feisty bartender Ling (Angelica Lee Sin Je), he proposes to use her as the Cybergirl model. When he gets turned down, he quits and starts his own company, using Ling as the model. Ling, on the other hand, is facing some problems of her own, with her father in jail, and her pushing E at the place she works at night to get money for some loansharks who are after her.

After a promising start that sort of seemed reminscent of recent films like Mabel Cheung's Beijing Rocks, the movie starts to meander in all kinds of directions, and soon the muddled storyline completely peters out. It never really becomes clear why Daniel Wu is so fascinated with Ling, or how she feels about the whole thing. The movie throws a few high-concept lines at the viewer (stuff about chasing your dreams etc), but all this talk about Princess Diana/Dream/Digital, about chasing dreams no matter what reality you live in feels rather hollow and doesn't enrich the storyline or the characters in any meaningful way.

Lots of sideplots drag the storyline down further: Ling's mother is somewhat delusional yet she dreams of emigrating. Daniel Wu's brother (Edison Chan) dreams of meeting a girl he has been flirting with on ICQ, and their dance instructor father (Anthony Wong) dreams of getting some dance videos made. We never quite know what Daniel is dreaming of - selling his computer game? Romancing Ling? The love story, which should be what carries this film along, feels passionless and random.

That being said, Sylvia Chang's direction is quite engaging, with at times beautiful cinematography and some really wonderful moments (Ling and Joker on a bicycle riding through HK at night). Too bad these wonderful moments never quite gel into a meaningful whole. I did enjoy watching the film, but constantly felt that something was missing and that this movie could have been so much more.

One last comment: The last few years have seen a number of films trying to reinvigorate action choreography by blending it with CGI effects. In most cases, I found those attempts to be less than satisfying. However, Princess d proved to me that it is possible to do this in a compelling manner: There's a brief scene at the beginning of the film where Ling and Joker leave the club through the backdoor and land in the middle of some sort of triad gang fight. Joker is high on E and the scene is shot from his perspective - Sylvia Chang did a fantastic job here, and this brief scene blows away anything Andrew Lau has attempted by its sheer force of visual imagination and sense of rhythm and pace. Breathtaking!