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Testing China's Censors With a Gay Love Story
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| 2002-1-13 13:28:03 来自：NEW YORK TIMES 作者：STEVE FRIESS 阅读273次 |
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BEIJING, Jan. 11 It might seem that the first film made in China that uses the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as a plot element would qualify for an automatic ban from the government for that reason alone.
Yet it may be an equally sensitive issue in China, homosexuality, that dooms the chances of the film, "Lan Yu," for legal showings in this nation. Despite both issues and other controversies, the film's producer, Zhang Yongning, is applying for approval from China's Bureau of Film to play it in theaters here. No date has been set for a decision.
The film will have its American debut on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival and will be distributed in the United States later in the year by Strand Releasing. It has already been released in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
"Lan Yu" is a gay love story shot without permission in Beijing that features full-frontal male nudity in a bedroom scene. Its lead character, Chen Handong, is a businessman who relies on official corruption and whose friends bribe judges to obtain his release from jail. The film derives its plot the on-and-off relationship between Handong and the decade-younger Lan Yu from an erotic novel, "Beijing Story," published anonymously only on the Internet in 1997 because another set of Chinese censors, those with authority over publishing, would not have approved it. The novel became a cult hit among gay men and lesbians here.
The principals of the film insist it is nothing more than the story of a touching 10-year romance between Handong and a student, Lan Yu (Liu Ye). Yet a 30-second sequence of gunfire and tears at Tiananmen Square is pivotal to the relationship between the men.
Advocates of increased acceptance of gay men and women in China hope "Lan Yu" can give viewers a more human view of homosexual life here.
Chung To, founder the Chi Heng Foundation, a gay-rights group, cited "Lan Yu" as a landmark that emerged in a year, 2001, that saw several other promising signs for gay men and lesbians in China. Among those were the declassification of homosexuality as an illness by the Chinese Psychological Association and the Health Ministry's acknowledgment that it must direct some AIDS prevention efforts toward gay men.
Chinese film scholars and others say that the few previous efforts to portray gay men and women in China have proved disappointing because they filled the screen with negative or inaccurate stereotypes.
Mr. Zhang, a former documentarian in China for the British Broadcasting Corporation, said he became obsessed with the material in 1999 when a friend passed him a printout of "Beijing Story." He eventually tracked down the reclusive author, whom he declines to identify, and bought the rights for about $500.
"I related immediately to Handong's character because I also was in my 30's, and having such an intense relationship with a man is something I might have wanted to do in my life," Mr. Zhang said. "I knew I had to make this into a movie."
Mr. Zhang, who is married and has a daughter, is, like the leading character, well connected in China. He is the son of a 70-year Communist Party member who once served as a provincial vice governor.
He contacted Stanley Kwan, a prominent and openly gay director in Hong Kong, who hesitated because the novel was so replete with explicit sex. But Mr. Zhang persuaded Mr. Kwan to see the potential in the love story and went on to get more than $1 million to finance the project.
Mr. Kwan's award-winning work in earlier films heavy on acting and character development attracted the actor Hu Jun, a matinee idol in China, to the part of Handong despite his initial difficulty with the homosexual content. "Stanley Kwan asked two actors to play gay roles, and both were not gay, so it was hard to really act as a gay at first because I treated Liu Ye as a buddy, not a girlfriend," said Mr. Hu, 33. "I came into the role viewing gay people as abnormal, but by the end I realized that gay people go through a lot of social stresses. I understand now that they are normal."
Mr. Zhang, who also plays Handong's brother-in-law, said: "This is not a film that contains very critical speeches. It's not critical of the government's policies. It is just a beautiful love story that happens to be between two men."
But sexuality often intersects with politics, and its combination with the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 makes a particularly combustible mixture. Tiananmen Square remains so sensitive a matter today that many Internet sites devoted to it are blocked in China.
"The Tiananmen Square event gave the world a very bad impression of the Chinese government, so the Communist Party hopes everyone can forget it," said Mei Fung, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. "If, even in fiction, you use Tiananmen Square as a plot, you try to recall its memory, so it's dangerous."
Mr. Kwan said he knew this but found a scene portraying the massacre unavoidable because Lan Yu's peril at Tiananmen forces Handong to recognize his love for the younger man. Handong is informed by his well-connected brother-in-law that the authorities plan to clear the square that night, June 4, and that Lan Yu is there. In a fast but emotional sequence, Handong searches for Lan Yu against a screaming stampede fleeing the gunfire, and the couple embrace intensely when they locate each other. The scene then cuts to a shot of Handong holding a naked Lan Yu in bed as the youth sobs uncontrollably.
"These are the times in which these characters lived, so we knew it was a risk, but we needed this traumatic event for Handong to realize how he feels for Lan Yu," Mr. Kwan said.
Mr. Kwan won best-director recognition at last month's Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, the island's most prestigious film honors. "Lan Yu" also received trophies for best picture, actor (Mr. Liu), cinematography and script.
Issues of politics and sexuality aside, "Lan Yu" has also been criticized on an artistic level by some, like Mr. Mei and Li Yu, a writer- director in Beijing, who made the mainland's first lesbian film in 2000 but hasn't obtained any domestic or overseas distribution for it. Both complain that huge leaps of time in the film are poorly explained and confusing. Mr. Kwan defends the pacing as a means of paring down the story to avoid "a soap-opera style this material didn't deserve."
In an e-mail exchange arranged by Mr. Zhang, the writer of the book on which the film is based, a Beijing woman who now lives in the United States, complained that the movie, which she generally admires, failed to offer a real Beijing sensibility. "The film didn't emphasize much on the background of mainland China and specifically that particular time period," the author wrote. "They use lots of `Hong Kong Mandarin,' which is like describing a New Yorker's story with a British accent."
But one high-profile "Lan Yu" admirer, Ang Lee, the director of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," dismissed the complaints.
"It does have a lot of Hong Kong looks, but I don't think it matters because it was filmed in Beijing," said Mr. Lee, a friend of Mr. Kwan's and director of "The Wedding Banquet," a 1993 Hollywood film about a gay Taiwanese man. "Stanley Kwan made a very human, well-done melodrama with great emotions. It spans some sensitive times in China in the 1980's and 1990's with some fresh touches to the homosexual love story that ring true for depicting the Beijing life."
The likelihood that "Lan Yu" will be approved for theatrical release in China is slim. No underground film has ever been retroactively approved after being shot without permission, said Peter Lorre, an American filmmaker living in Beijing whose production company has financed the top-grossing Chinese films for each of the last four years.
But a low-quality version of the film is available in China. Black- market video discs filmed off the screen in Hong Kong are sold on the street here. |
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