Lan Yu Review Stanley Kwans Masterly And Gentle Beijingset Gay Melodrama
As Stanley Kwan's brilliant 2001 melodrama begins, entrepreneur Chen Handong (Hu Jun) travels back to the 1980s and meets Lan Yu (Liu Ye), a young and eager-to-care-for rural architecture student. and more The old man warns his little boy not to associate with him. "When two friends know each other well, it's time to break up," he says, ignoring her advice. Lan gives Yuri gifts and even buys her a villa, but outside events put too much pressure on her. Hanong feels compelled to marry this woman and Lan Yu joins the Tiananmen Square protests. The carnage may be reduced to noise here, but its inclusion helps explain why the film was cleverly made with gay content (for which the main cast received verbal warnings from the authorities).
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It is an adaptation of Kwan Beijing Story, a famous but anonymous 1996 web novel that borders on gay pornography. It is more reserved and melancholic. the end of the century and the XXI. It remains one of the strongest works of the Chinese gay wave of the early 20th century (along with The Fish and the Elephant and The Palace of the East and the Palace of the West), elegantly incorporating social commentary and mixing political themes. Khandong looks like a construction site in Beijing in its heyday, a diagnosis confirmed by the film's final images, but the devastation is as material as it is emotional. The power dynamic between him and Lan Yu shifts unexpectedly, and sudden leaps in history ensure that neither we nor they will ever be on Earth. Part of the credit goes to the extraordinary William Chang, Wong Kar-wai's frequent collaborator and perhaps the only talent on the job, who excels in editing as well as costume design and direction.
As befits a film structured like a long flashback, the colors often appear faded, like photographs thrown over the fireplace; The new 4K restoration beautifully preserves Yang Tao and Zhang Jian's time-lapse cinematography. Kwan intersperses the stage with props and characters, the way he films his actors through mirrors and doorways, which contrasts with pastimes that give the action an inaccessible distance. Zhang Yadong's score is based on a harp motif that gently touches the heart, but never provides a resolution.
