Twenty-five-year-old Nikki—whose friends call her Coco after Coco Chanel, Bai Ling—is a young Shanghainese writer, fascinated by the West and Western culture. A graduate of Fudan University, Coco has already published a successful collection of short stories, The Shriek of the Butterfly, noted for its sexually frank themes told from a woman’s point of view. With that early success, Coco dreams of composing her first novel, a semi-autobiographical work set in Shanghai, where the city’s pulse and its quiet corners will play against her own evolving desires.
The story opens with Coco working as a waitress in a Shanghai cafe. While at work, she meets a sensitive-looking young man, Tian Tian [Gregory Wong Chung-Yiu], and the two spark an intense connection that pulls Coco away from her familiar surroundings. Coco leaves her parents’ home to move in with Tian Tian, drawn by his vulnerability and artistic sensibility. Yet Tian Tian is deeply anxious and shy, scarred by a childhood in which his mother left him in the care of his grandmother after his father’s mysterious death. He now refuses to speak to the mother who still sends money from Spain, living with the shadow of estrangement that shadows his every move. His emotional fragility renders him impotent, preventing them from consummating their relationship and complicating Coco’s dreams of closeness and narrative clarity.
Coco’s world expands when she meets another man—a large, blond German named Mark [Luke Goss]—whose presence in Shanghai edges her toward a new but dangerous possibility. The two are irresistibly drawn to each other, and they begin a passionate affair despite Mark’s marriage and Coco’s living arrangement with Tian Tian. Mark seems to seek only pleasure, and Coco finds herself torn between a growing pull toward him and the obligations she feels toward Tian Tian. The tension between loyalty, desire, and the lure of the unknown creates a feeling of precarious balance that keeps pulling Coco in different directions.
Tian Tian, sensing that something is off, withdraws further and slips into drug use. He undertakes a journey to the south of China, leaving Coco alone in Shanghai. Coco continues her relationship with Mark, even after meeting Mark’s wife and child at a company-sponsored event, a confrontation that underscores the complexities of desire, secrecy, and social appearances in a cosmopolitan setting. Coco later discovers that Tian Tian has become addicted to morphine and travels to bring him back to Shanghai, where he enters a rehab center. At the same time, Tian Tian’s mother returns from Spain with her husband, and the two are briefly reunited, though Tian Tian remains haunted by a deep-seated hostility toward her that he cannot overcome.
As the emotional stakes rise, Mark reveals plans to move back to Berlin, signaling an imminent parting between Coco and her new lover. Coco spends several days in Mark’s apartment, living with a heightened sense of romance and risk, and she does not tell Tian Tian that she will be absent. When she returns to her own flat, she finds that Tian Tian has left for a friend’s house after confirming his suspicions about the affair. Mark departs Shanghai, and Coco and Tian Tian resume living together, their fragile domestic equilibrium restored by a shared, uneasy routine.
Tragically, Coco’s world is shattered when she wakes to the devastating truth: Tian Tian has died from a heroin overdose, a death that casts a long shadow over their Shanghai story and leaves Coco to process the consequences of the choices she has made. The film closes with a quiet reminder of the cost of passion and the fragile line between longing and loss, leaving Coco to confront the question of what comes next in a life forever altered by love, guilt, and the aftermath of addiction.
