By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer
Queer movies incorporate sexuality into narratives that extend more broadly into self-identity, and how love is ultimately a force of collision. At the heart of two East Asian films I watched this week, tumultuous love stories unfold as characters contend with themselves in their relationships.
Struggles in love are much more complicated than the mechanics of social acceptance — a frenetic kind of desire swallows everyone, indiscriminately.
East Palace, West Palace (1996)
Being gay is taboo in Beijing, where the movie’s protagonists, young writer A-Lan and police officer Xiao Shi, are based. This movie depicts desire with a focus on interior friction instead of social approval. Married to a woman but actively cruising, A-Lan accepts his society’s hostility. As intimacy is continually monologued as presupposed by or following brutality, A-Lan fades the hardships in his life behind how alive he feels when he cruises. Coalesced pain and satisfaction accumulate in A-Lan’s writing, but the stories he tells Xiao Shi during an interrogation overlap with lived real experiences.
Xiao Shi’s homophobia is a symptom of his own incompatible desires with his outwardly rigid identity. The dialogue-heavy movie unravels into an examination of the belief that suffering and intimacy are inseparable as the interrogator flips to become the interrogated.
The cinematography is beautiful, as it draws leisurely through parks and peeks voyeuristically through glass. Movements feel vibrantly choreographed as the characters dodge and return each other’s touch across the screen. Shown in rich colour, the film explicates sexual identity as something complicated, brutal, and ineffaceable.
Set in Vancouver, this diaspora film follows Chinese Canadian Jake as he grapples with his identity in the context of his heritage, conflicting interests of photography and basketball, and complicated attractions to his long-term girlfriend and next-door neighbour. Typical of coming of age stories, Jake’s identity emerges from a variety of conflicting influences that contradict vicarious expectations imposed by his immigrant parents. While his classmates broadcast their lives, Jake hides behind the camera instead. His interest in photography suggests self-identity is something constructed from the view of others. Creative framing resembling Instagram posts establishes an alienating social dynamic of spectator and poster. It invites the viewer into Jake’s life, as it separates from what he shares online.
In the film, Jake must also confront the role sexuality plays in his social life. At the climax of the movie, Jake has his first queer experience, leaving the viewer to wonder if this is the first moment of honesty to his suppressed desires. When social media outs Jake to the whole school, love becomes a buoy in gossipy waters and something to float Jake through expectations he drowns in. At the end of the movie, Jake’s efforts to conquer shame pay off, as he becomes someone he is proud of.
Across time, these movies transmit the struggles of love as amorphous processes beyond queer-exclusive acceptance narratives. How others perceive someone is not always the truest iteration of their identity. Both of these films show how this uncomfortable speculation evolves into a satisfying ending once people can articulate their desires. These films centre on queer relationships, but never treat queerness as the ultimate end of their characters. After all, who you love is only part of why.
