O Outro Lado da Cidade Proibida

This film uses very simple means to tell its powerful story. I am very found of films which do exactly this, that composes a story with emotions in a condensed way that does not preach to you, that does not tell you in bad taste how to feel, but that still moves you, not only in the theater, but also later on.

I am sure that this film can evoke mixed emotions. Because as a viewer we may want one of the characters to be the victim, we may want him to be the one at the bottom which should fight, take the battle and overcome his oppressor. But that is not how the story is told. For those of you who know Genet and have read Genet's stories, you will know the ambiguity that can be given to the oppressor/victim relation. And how full of meaning and emotions a single object or moment can be.

So if you have read Genet and liked it, you will like this film. But be warned, if you are expecting a story which delivers a story about poor gay men in less fortunate countries, you will be challenged, not to think the other way around, however, rather to view the world in more than one dimension.

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.

It's my second time watching this film, the first time was almost 10 years ago. Still this gay- theme film remains to be shocking and controversial at the same times.

For the pros, I love its poetic atmosphere from its cinematography, lightning arrangement and the limited setting made it close to a play; and theme-aside, Yuan Zhang's directional abilities continue to surface from this film, the main scene is a small police office in Beijing where there is a fierce confrontation between a camp gay writer and a night-patrol policeman, which narrates the story of the life of the gay man. Usually I feel antipathetic against groups stereotyping as in this case, not every gay is campy, nevertheless in the film with its narrative novelty, it evolves into something could be perceive as some kind of funny performance art.

For the cons, the intrusions of Chinese opera are functionally essential but visually redundant. Judging from the conversations (especially from the policeman, a boring performance from Jun Hu), the director stands firmly as an outsider with some detectable mocking attitude, which damages the visceral influence to some extent.

A Chinese film explicit exploring of gay world in 1996 itself could be concluded as a both adventurous and smart strategy, although I don't like the film as a whole, it did help Yuan Zhang establish his status as an avant-garde Chinese director, who later films like GREEN TEA (2003), I Love You (2003) and Little Red Flowers (2006) are more mainstream and carry his own trademark, a superior feeling towards his objects (un unmarried master-degree female, the monomaniac struggle between a young married couple, the kindergarten children respectively).

P.S. - The film is adapted from a short story by the late Chinese novelist Xiaobo Wang, which I haven't read yet.

I understand this film was banned in China because it deals with homosexuality. I prefer to think that it was banned because it could bore its audiences to death. Basically the story of a frustrated and screwed-up little Chinese queen who falls for a policeman who arrests him for cruising the park, this attempt at a movie is badly directed, incredible badly edited, static to the point of being a series of still pictures at times, with actors who maintain a single expression and have little to make one feel sympathy for them. Good grief... I sat through it though my hand itched to fast-forward to the end of this dreary exercise in movie-making. Skip this one...

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")