Tuesday, June 4 - June 23
Lan Yu (藍宇, Stanley Kwan, 2001)
124 S 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY 11249, USA
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LAN YU
(藍宇)
dir. Stanley Kwan, 2001
96 mins. China/Hong Kong.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Based on a novel first published online by one “Beijing Comrade” in 1998, LAN YU is a breakthrough film, a queer drama set against the backdrop of the student movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While the book was infamous for its erotic descriptive passages, director Stanley Kwan wanted to expand the source material to focus on the tortured romance between the story’s eponymous architecture student (Liu Ye) and his lover, a closeted businessman of the older generation named Chen Handong (Hu Jun). The result is a film that’s both elliptical and brutally sharp, a diagnosis in the class differences and mores (and thus, denials) that helped foment the dissent of the late eighties – in particular, the corruption of China’s bureaucratic (and, by proximity to government, emerging bourgeois) classes. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat portrayal of desire and devastation through Lan Yu’s fast-eroding innocence, with a plot spanning multiple years of unrequited passion.
Widely heralded as one of the greatest living Hong Kong filmmakers for works like CENTER STAGE and ROUGE, Stanley Kwan has still never gotten a proper retrospective in North America; hopefully these screenings will help renew interest in his fascinating and singular body of work. “In my last film THE ISLAND TALES, I made simple things too complicated, “he said. “And so this time I’ve tried to make complicated things less complicated, or simple things even simpler… What I was interested in was how we could transform June 4 into the moment that Chen Handong commits to Lan Yu… The fact that the story took place in Beijing, a city foreign to me, didn’t bother me…. I might not be Lan Yu and my boyfriend might not be Chen Handong, but virtually everything they go through in the novel I’ve been through with my partner.”
“Courageously simple and frank… The film eliminates most of the novel’s near-porno sex scenes and tones down the melodrama, producing a matter of fact and emotionally truthful account of a relationship marked by its time and place. Superbly acted, too.” – Time Out London
“Pulpy and mesmerizing.” – Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle
From BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JUNE: Tiananmen Square Revisited.
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(藍宇)
dir. Stanley Kwan, 2001
96 mins. China/Hong Kong.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Based on a novel first published online by one “Beijing Comrade” in 1998, LAN YU is a breakthrough film, a queer drama set against the backdrop of the student movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While the book was infamous for its erotic descriptive passages, director Stanley Kwan wanted to expand the source material to focus on the tortured romance between the story’s eponymous architecture student (Liu Ye) and his lover, a closeted businessman of the older generation named Chen Handong (Hu Jun). The result is a film that’s both elliptical and brutally sharp, a diagnosis in the class differences and mores (and thus, denials) that helped foment the dissent of the late eighties – in particular, the corruption of China’s bureaucratic (and, by proximity to government, emerging bourgeois) classes. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat portrayal of desire and devastation through Lan Yu’s fast-eroding innocence, with a plot spanning multiple years of unrequited passion.
Widely heralded as one of the greatest living Hong Kong filmmakers for works like CENTER STAGE and ROUGE, Stanley Kwan has still never gotten a proper retrospective in North America; hopefully these screenings will help renew interest in his fascinating and singular body of work. “In my last film THE ISLAND TALES, I made simple things too complicated, “he said. “And so this time I’ve tried to make complicated things less complicated, or simple things even simpler… What I was interested in was how we could transform June 4 into the moment that Chen Handong commits to Lan Yu… The fact that the story took place in Beijing, a city foreign to me, didn’t bother me…. I might not be Lan Yu and my boyfriend might not be Chen Handong, but virtually everything they go through in the novel I’ve been through with my partner.”
“Courageously simple and frank… The film eliminates most of the novel’s near-porno sex scenes and tones down the melodrama, producing a matter of fact and emotionally truthful account of a relationship marked by its time and place. Superbly acted, too.” – Time Out London
“Pulpy and mesmerizing.” – Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle
From BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JUNE: Tiananmen Square Revisited.
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