East Palace, West Palace

'East Palace, West Palace' is a film that's immeasurably diminished, indeed misunderstood, if it's labeled a gay film.

Certainly, 'East Palace, West Palace' explores issues related to the gay experience. But that's the first, and indeed facile, layer. There are more.

In its context, it poses a society in transition. It explores the constructs of power, of state machinery, and how institutions and ideas past their prime can dehumanize both parties, victims as well as perpetrators.

The film has moments of lyrical and almost escapist beauty, leaving no room for the claustrophobia that the plot construct could easily have engendered. Visually and verbally, poetry in a police station makes for near-surreal surprises.

As it builds, the film undergoes sudden shifts, rising much above comment on the politics of desire. Instead, it begins to underline the politics of politics itself. The rights being debated in that one night in the police station have much more to do with the right to freedom, the right to self-expression, the right to identity, than to do with the right to cruise in parks.

In a lot of issue-based cinema, marginalization affects both parties equally. Both the person wielding the stick and the person encountering the stick get trapped in their predefined roles. Not so in 'East Palace, West Palace'. In the dialectic between the two protagonists, there can be no clear lines drawn between the powerful and the overpowered, the loving and the loved.

Intensely abstract, and, simultaneously, intensely personal. That's how 'East Palace, West Palace' succeeds for me.

As a gay man who'd expected to see yet another gay film, I should've checked my labels in at the door.

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.

East Palace West Palace focuses on the nightlong interrogation of A Lan, a Chinese gay man `arrested' by Hu Jun, a policeman, in a park. In this case A Lan was picked up earlier in the day and let go by the officer. Unlike the others who have commented on this film, I think that the main plot point is that Hu Jun is attracted to A Lan from the very beginning and is trying to understand his own feelings as he asks his prisoner questions. As evidenced by the kiss that A Lan gives the officer when he is first let go, I think that the A Lan knows as well.

This movie moves slowly and is only really interesting if you buy into this psychological premise. I don't see the self-loathing that others seem to see in this film and was fascinated as the power struggle between the two men was waged. One had the full weight and power of the law on his side, the other had desire and sexual attraction.

In Beijing, gays have hidden sexual encounters in a park during the night and are severely repressed by the police. The writer A Lan (Si Han) is arrested by the policeman Xiao Shi (Jun Hu) and along the whole night, he is interrogated, disclosing his hard life-story since he was a child and his crush on Xiao Shi.

"Dong Gong Xi Gong" could be called confessions of an infatuated gay writer in Beijing. This film is bald and in accordance with the information on the cover of the VHS, "it is the first Chinese movie assumed gay, success in whole world… forbidden in China". The theatrical story is well acted by Si Han and Jun Hu. In accordance with the opinion of some IMDb reviewers, this film would be a metaphor of the repressive situation in China, but is it? I do not agree with this intellectualized interpretation, and in my opinion, it is a simple and well acted gay romance, better and better than the famous "Broke Back Mountain". My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "O Outro Lado da Cidade Proibida" ("The Other Side of the Forbidden City")

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.