20 years on, Lan Yu remains the pin­na­cle of Chi­nese queer cinema

This year marks the 20^th anniver­sary of Hong Kong New Wave auteur Stan­ley Kwan’s queer clas­sic Lan Yu, which pre­miered at the 2001 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val and pro­ceed­ed to take top hon­ours at the Hong Kong Film Awards and Tai­wan Gold­en Horse Awards. Due to the film’s explic­it depic­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, it has nev­er been released the­atri­cal­ly in main­land Chi­na, achiev­ing its cult sta­tus thanks to online pira­cy. This month the CineCi­na Film Fes­ti­val will pre­mière the film’s 4K restora­tion at the SVA The­ater in New York, (re)introducing audi­ences to an art­house masterpiece.

Adapt­ed from an anony­mous author’s homo­erot­ic web fic­tion titled ​‘Bei­jing Sto­ry’, Lan Yu is a poignant, heart-wrench­ing love sto­ry between two men in a time of eco­nom­ic reform, class strug­gle and civ­il unrest. Back­dropped by the noirish urban land­scape of Bei­jing dur­ing the late 1980s and ​’90s, the film chron­i­cles the on-and-off rela­tion­ship between Lan Yu (Liu Ye), a finan­cial­ly strug­gling archi­tec­ture stu­dent, and Chen Han­dong (Hu Jun), a clos­et­ed busi­ness mogul. Not only has the film been hailed as a mile­stone in Chi­nese queer cin­e­ma, it is also the pin­na­cle of Kwan’s aes­thet­ic vision.

An inter­na­tion­al­ly less­er-known phe­nom­e­non in China’s enter­tain­ment indus­try is that pseu­do-homoro­man­tic stream­ing shows are defin­i­tive­ly main­stream and tremen­dous­ly lucra­tive. Since the ear­ly ​’00s, the niche genre of queer web fic­tion, which com­bines erot­i­ca and melo­dra­ma, has gained pop­u­lar­i­ty among LGBTQ+ and female read­ers. With young women now the pre­dom­i­nant con­sumers of pop cul­ture in Chi­na, film and tele­vi­sion com­pa­nies are active­ly seek­ing out web fic­tion source mate­r­i­al to adapt. The orig­i­nal homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, how­ev­er, is rewrit­ten into homoso­cial­i­ty for the screen to cir­cum­vent cen­sor­ships and qual­i­fy for wider broad­casts and releases.

Chi­nese stream­ing giants have used this for­mu­la to pro­duce The Untamed and World of Hon­or, the most watched shows in Chi­na over the past cou­ple of years. This has led to the exploita­tion of the show’s queer and female fan­doms, as the straight lead actors are encour­aged to engage in homoro­man­tic pub­lic­i­ty stunts. Back­dropped by the grow­ing com­mer­cial hype around web fic­tion, Lan Yu was in this sense the first of its kind – a web fic­tion adap­ta­tion cre­at­ed by a team sole­ly ded­i­cat­ed to their craft.

Chi­nese queer web fic­tion is quin­tes­sen­tial­ly char­ac­terised by emo­tive aes­theti­cism – de-empha­sis­ing nar­ra­tive, sen­sa­tion­al­is­ing dia­logue and roman­ti­cis­ing sce­nar­ios. ​‘Bei­jing Sto­ry’ was there­fore the per­fect source mate­r­i­al for Kwan to fur­ther exper­i­ment with his poet­ic film lan­guage. It was also a time­ly oppor­tu­ni­ty for him to explore the sub­ject of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, which was espe­cial­ly per­son­al for him as the most high-pro­file open­ly gay direc­tor in Hong Kong and main­land China.

Though Lan Yu’s nar­ra­tive is seem­ing­ly lin­ear, Kwan uses episod­ic edit­ing to com­press the pas­sage of time in the film, ren­der­ing Lan Yu and Handong’s decade-long grav­i­ta­tion­al push-and-pull as an ethe­re­al wet dream. While it doesn’t have the homo­erot­i­ca of ​‘Bei­jing Sto­ry’, Kwan’s film is still a deeply sen­su­al view­ing expe­ri­ence, with the male char­ac­ters’ bod­ies bathed in soft light and inti­mate­ly framed. In turn, the couple’s car­nal instincts accen­tu­ate the innate melan­choly of their fatal­is­tic romance.

There is a per­sis­tent mis­con­cep­tion that the title character’s death was added only for shock val­ue. But his death is sym­bol­ic, an indict­ment of the social stig­ma and polit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion that dooms his love. Con­scious­ly ide­al­is­ing the couple’s romance only to destroy it, Lan Yu remains an affect­ing coun­ter­point to the het­ero­nor­ma­tiv­i­ty of Chi­nese media.

For screen­ing info vis­it cine​-cina​.co