In Chinese director Lou Ye's torrid new romance Spring Fever, we are abruptly introduced to two young men driving through the rain. The guys stop to piss in a river; they push each other around on a small bridge like frisky schoolboys; and before we can get our bearings, the two are making rough, passionate love in a dark room with dirty sheets. It's an important new work from a filmmaker who has already suffered banning and banishment from his government for the cultural crime of dealing with taboo subjects like the rights of the individual and the events surrounding the brutally repressed demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Spring Fever kicks into a very kinky gear when we notice that our couple is being tailed by an impetuous young private eye, a bisexual stud who boasts the libido of a 17-year-old, and whose brazen disregard for the line between business and pleasure will more than once put this drama into an erotic overdrive. Eventually a line will be crossed that will put everybody involved in peril, in the process producing a robust, obsessive love triangle that rivals classics like Jules and Jim.

"A girl, okay, but a boy? You want to destroy us?"

A fierce admirer of such Western homo-friendly lower-depths slumfests as Midnight Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, director Lou Ye means his rutting bareback boys to be a device for, as he says in a recent interview, "penetrating the interior life of a person, reversing the momentum of recent decades of Chinese history and revealing an individual's innermost desires, secret impulses."

Spring Fever doesn't let these intellectual musings get in the way of a runaway locomotive of a story that features three handsome men, two women scorned, and, along the way, some amusing insights into the messy behemoth of the modern Chinese economy. Lou Ye breaks his story into chapters with whimsical headings like, "Nanjing, March, just after the Day of the Insects' Awakening."

He keeps the erotic pot boiling by filming his rutting boys close-up in seedy surroundings that don't distract us from the business at hand. The result is one of the most boldly sensual/sexual Asian film feasts since Ang Lee's Lust, Caution.

Spring Fever should definitely be caught in a theatre, but if you miss the commercial run, the DVD will hit stores on Aug. 17 from Strand Releasing (suggested retail price: $24.99). By the way, if you're a big fan of Hitchcock's Vertigo, be sure to grab a copy of Lou Ye's splendid 2001 homage to the master, Suzhou River.