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Blue Sun Palace snuck up on me like no other film has in a while. This was not in my MAMI watchlist but its screening fit in my schedule so I went ahead. And boy was I mesmerised. A young woman and a middle-aged man are in love and they spend the night together in a spa store where the former works. The things they talk about and dream about are enough to melt me or anyone who's loved someone before. But the way the film moves after that triggers melancholia that is hard to ignore. Blue Sun Palace is a profound film about loneliness and the way it captures desolation and depression and helplessness is bound to tear you up. It's a film that you want to escape from but once you do you'll keep thinking about it. The man character and his dreamy attitude is something I want to mimic.

(Watched at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)

BLUE SUN PALACE is set in Queens, Nee York in the present day. The characters are immigrants from Taiwan. Didi and Amy, who survive by working in a massage parlor, want to leave the city to open a restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. A genuinely kind man befriends Didi. It is after this moment that the drama begins.

The movie is photographed in a very direct way, the acting is naturalistic and, above all, a sense of what women go through is conveyed.

It has one of the best fade-outs I've ever seen. BLUE SUN PALACE appears to have little to no studio trickery. In fact, its minimalism is cinematic. It is a well-acted story of ordinary people, but it is not a staged play or a short story on a screen. It is well-realized cinema.