Like the masterly Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly has its roots in recent headlines. A French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, was tried on charges of espionage for divulging secrets to his lover of twenty years, a former star of the Beijing opera. For Boursicot though, the most devastating revelation at his trial was not that diva Shi Pei-pu was spying, but that far from being the mother of his child, she was in fact a man.

Hwang sets his story between 1964 and 1968, and has diplomat Rene Gallimard (Jeremy Irons) so bewitched by a performance of Puccini's Madame Butterfly that he embarks on a relationship with Song Liling (John Lone), the opera's beautiful star. Unknown to the culturally impoverished Gallimard (in Chinese opera, the women's roles are taken by men) Liling is far from the woman she seems, and a Red Brigade spy to boot; he is only too willing to acquiesce to her pleas that she remain clothed during their love-making, while she entrances him with "Oriental secrets" of her devising, eventually going so far as to 'bear' his child.

Cronenberg has long shown his ability to work outside of pure genre (Dead Ringers, for one), and with little effort it is easy to see why this tale of identity and transformation should so appeal to his idiosyncratic talents. That the translation from stage to big-screen should prove problematic should equally come as no surprise. It is inevitably overshadowed both by Jordan's The Crying Game and Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, both in its locating of sexual identity and, in the latter case, an immersion in the world of Chinese opera. But where Jordan was prepared to keep Jaye Davidson's secret for a moment of shock and revelation, Cronenberg has no such luxury or intention. There is no question of Lone's sexuality, leaving it begging to be asked, does Gallimard recognise and deny the fact himself, or is he simply strikingly naive? The former seems scarcely credible (particularly where his child is concerned), and the latter staggering. What is barely tenable on the heightened unreality of the stage collapses wholesale in the close-up universe of film.

Because of this, it is in the second half of the picture where Cronenberg seems most at home. Here, having returned to Paris, Gallimard slips into the same kind of elegant collapse suffered by James Woods in Videodrome, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and, most notably, Irons himself in the aforementioned Dead Ringers. In its way, the trademark of a Cronenberg hero (though hardly his Burroughs creation in Naked Lunch), no one does it better than Irons, who put his Oscar (nominally for Reversal of Fortune) down to the work he did for the Canadian. Without the encumbrance of Lone, the intriguing Irons gives yet another committed and arresting performance, albeit one that cannot for a moment convince an audience that he is in the slightest French.

This does not, however, devalue Lone in himself. Indeed, although hardly explicit, there is a level of candour and unselfconsciousness to the playing between he and Irons that all too easily alienates much of the director's potential audience. Cronenberg plays with the homoerotic in a surprisingly ingenuous manner, as has become his wont over the last couple of films (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch). When the film is given over to the two of them alone (and with the requisite suspension of disbelief) it takes on an undeniable power - particularly in a compelling, extended, almost stagy sequence toward the end, where having revealed himself as both man and spy, Lone bares himself (literally and metaphorically) to Irons. Something similar might also be said for Barbara Sukowa as Gallimard's wife, but after some intriguing work early on (her mocking rendition of Butterfly for one) she frustratingly vanishes with scarcely a mention.

More problematic still, Cronenberg's film cannot resist a prison coda, where (barely plausibly) Irons paints himself with a geisha face for the edification of fellow prisoners, and sacrifices himself to his own naivety. The purpose is self-evident (sacrifice forms the raison d'etre of much of Cronenberg's work - think of Woods, Goldblum and Irons, not to mention Chambers and Reed), but here it is a coup de theatre from a different film entirely, both forced and not a little pretentious.

On the plus side, production designer Carol Spier and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky conspire to at least make this look like a Cronenberg film (turn a corner in this Beijing and stumble into Interzone), and Howard Shore contributes yet another of his wonderfully dour scores that helps the tone immeasurably.

The overall problem here is that, deep down, this is not a David Cronenberg film, but someone else's work into which he is attempting to hammer his professional identity. It happened with The Dead Zone and again here, where all sense the film-maker's unique worldview is subsumed by the whole. (Never has he looked more uneasy than with the expansive location filming, or the Paris riots re-enacted in here). If what he was looking for was a commercial hit, he was never going to find it in this bizarre material, and nor, one suspects, is it to be found in his recently announced intention to make the film version of the immensely silly American Psycho. The sooner he finally gets down to putting Ballard's Crash before the cameras the better. Until then, M. Butterfly may be an interesting failure, but remains very much a failure nonetheless.