East Palace, West Palace

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.

This haunting Chinese film is multi-texured. It is not just about being gay; it examines the very fabric of Chinese society in Beijing, which pretty much represents Chinese society in just about every city in China. It makes a strong political .statement without being political. It makes a strong social statement about those who are judgmental about gay men and their chosen lifestyle. And most of all; it humanizes a gay man. This man is far more in touch with his feelings than is his inquisitor. In my opinion, this film is better than Brokeback Mountain, but not quite as good as Philadephia and The Boys in the Band, the two best films ever made on gay lifestyles, and which humanize their protagonists, rather than sensationalize them. I can recommend this film as a unique cinematic experience.

At a park where gays cruise for sex, police routinely harass them but can't actually charge them for a crime, even when confronted with "regulars". One is young writer A-Lan, who is picked up one night and spends until daybreak telling the sole policeman his life story. Interspersed with flashbacks, and also illustrations using Chinese opera (which I doubt is part of any actual opera). There is also a question as to how much of the story is true, and how much is his writer's imagination.

A-Lan keeps falling in love with handsome / taller / dominant men, and is happy to be sexually used and physically abused. It is not clear if any of his love objects actually self-identify as gay. However, A-Lan not only identifies as gay, but also has a gender fluidity with regards to those he loves, telling them to "treat me like a girl".

The Chinese opera depictions are interesting, but other things disappoint. It seems unlikely that a house with a suite of rooms is occupied by only one policeman, even overnight. Also, A-Lan's wife is mentioned but not explained.

This is a very unflattering depiction of one gay man's life in China, which could be generalized to all gay life in China of the period. Interestingly the film was banned in China for its gay subject matter, but China should have distributed it widely to warn against "going gay" by using this as a warning example.

For anyone who views understatement in cinema as dull, this is not the film to see. Every line, every angle, every event are introduced almost as if the viewer were in the same room with the actors, or at least on the edges looking in closely. Even its more melodramatic moments seem controlled, almost introspective.

The classical unities of stage drama hold sway here. Like the latter scenes in the film "Bent," there is a sexual tension that merges with a political theme. Ultimately that demonstrates freedom exercised in the face of tyranny. While I think it would be too limiting to emphasize either one or the other of these two elements, as some of the few comments here have stated or implied, any perceptive viewer is likely to come away with a feeling of frustration. And that is as it should be. It is a hallmark of any good story, cinematic or otherwise, to engage the imagination of a viewer or reader so as to elicit more questions than answers.

This is a movie that could just as well be a play acted in a small theater, a short story from the pages of a literary magazine, or a reality show played out before a psychology class. A small gem.

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.