East Palace, West Palace

'East Palace, West Palace' is a film that's immeasurably diminished, indeed misunderstood, if it's labeled a gay film.

Certainly, 'East Palace, West Palace' explores issues related to the gay experience. But that's the first, and indeed facile, layer. There are more.

In its context, it poses a society in transition. It explores the constructs of power, of state machinery, and how institutions and ideas past their prime can dehumanize both parties, victims as well as perpetrators.

The film has moments of lyrical and almost escapist beauty, leaving no room for the claustrophobia that the plot construct could easily have engendered. Visually and verbally, poetry in a police station makes for near-surreal surprises.

As it builds, the film undergoes sudden shifts, rising much above comment on the politics of desire. Instead, it begins to underline the politics of politics itself. The rights being debated in that one night in the police station have much more to do with the right to freedom, the right to self-expression, the right to identity, than to do with the right to cruise in parks.

In a lot of issue-based cinema, marginalization affects both parties equally. Both the person wielding the stick and the person encountering the stick get trapped in their predefined roles. Not so in 'East Palace, West Palace'. In the dialectic between the two protagonists, there can be no clear lines drawn between the powerful and the overpowered, the loving and the loved.

Intensely abstract, and, simultaneously, intensely personal. That's how 'East Palace, West Palace' succeeds for me.

As a gay man who'd expected to see yet another gay film, I should've checked my labels in at the door.

In Beijing, gays have hidden sexual encounters in a park during the night and are severely repressed by the police. The writer A Lan (Si Han) is arrested by the policeman Xiao Shi (Jun Hu) and along the whole night, he is interrogated, disclosing his hard life-story since he was a child and his crush on Xiao Shi.

"Dong Gong Xi Gong" could be called confessions of an infatuated gay writer in Beijing. This film is bald and in accordance with the information on the cover of the VHS, "it is the first Chinese movie assumed gay, success in whole world… forbidden in China". The theatrical story is well acted by Si Han and Jun Hu. In accordance with the opinion of some IMDb reviewers, this film would be a metaphor of the repressive situation in China, but is it? I do not agree with this intellectualized interpretation, and in my opinion, it is a simple and well acted gay romance, better and better than the famous "Broke Back Mountain". My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Outro Lado da Cidade Proibida" ("The Other Side of the Forbidden City")

It's my second time watching this film, the first time was almost 10 years ago. Still this gay- theme film remains to be shocking and controversial at the same times.

For the pros, I love its poetic atmosphere from its cinematography, lightning arrangement and the limited setting made it close to a play; and theme-aside, Yuan Zhang's directional abilities continue to surface from this film, the main scene is a small police office in Beijing where there is a fierce confrontation between a camp gay writer and a night-patrol policeman, which narrates the story of the life of the gay man. Usually I feel antipathetic against groups stereotyping as in this case, not every gay is campy, nevertheless in the film with its narrative novelty, it evolves into something could be perceive as some kind of funny performance art.

For the cons, the intrusions of Chinese opera are functionally essential but visually redundant. Judging from the conversations (especially from the policeman, a boring performance from Jun Hu), the director stands firmly as an outsider with some detectable mocking attitude, which damages the visceral influence to some extent.

A Chinese film explicit exploring of gay world in 1996 itself could be concluded as a both adventurous and smart strategy, although I don't like the film as a whole, it did help Yuan Zhang establish his status as an avant-garde Chinese director, who later films like GREEN TEA (2003), I Love You (2003) and Little Red Flowers (2006) are more mainstream and carry his own trademark, a superior feeling towards his objects (un unmarried master-degree female, the monomaniac struggle between a young married couple, the kindergarten children respectively).

P.S. - The film is adapted from a short story by the late Chinese novelist Xiaobo Wang, which I haven't read yet.

East Palace West Palace is an excellent film for its subtle attention to the relation of power and subordination in modern China. Set in present day Bejing, it boldly shirks the trend of the "fifth-generation" Chinese directors to ignore contemporary issues. Among the more daring of those films, To Live and The Blue Kite presented us with the dehumanization on which China's current population was founded; EPWP explores the inhumanity it faces now.

The main characters evince the respective macrocosms of the subordinated Chinese civilian populace and its privileged oppressors. A Lan is a gay man, rounded up in a park near the Forbidden City by Xiao Shi, a police officer. The plot involves A Lan's night-long interrogation, involving flashbacks of his hard life. The film is not sympathetic to homosexuality, despite its casual screenings at gay festivals, exuberant to find identification in a foreign culture. Rather, it uses homosexuality as a portrayal of weakness and subordination, to a powerful end. The film's telling message resides in a philosophy I've explored in the writings of Gandhi and James Joyce--that a repressed society is always in someway responsible for its own domination. Xiao Shi finds A Lan's homosexuality reprehensible, but the detached, scrawny, weak A Lan eventually falls in "love" with him. In China, everyone is in some way a catamite of state power. As A Lan has been arrested for the night, so the Chinese have been ensnared in a dark age. As dawn approaches, the film builds to a confusing, frightful, bitter, and ultimately moving catharsis. It is not afraid to look forward, into the rising sun.

I understand this film was banned in China because it deals with homosexuality. I prefer to think that it was banned because it could bore its audiences to death. Basically the story of a frustrated and screwed-up little Chinese queen who falls for a policeman who arrests him for cruising the park, this attempt at a movie is badly directed, incredible badly edited, static to the point of being a series of still pictures at times, with actors who maintain a single expression and have little to make one feel sympathy for them. Good grief... I sat through it though my hand itched to fast-forward to the end of this dreary exercise in movie-making. Skip this one...