Lan Yu

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Hong Kong cinema?

No, we're not looking for the obvious answer here – the one that begins with Windtalkers, John Woo's latest dulling-down of the ferocious fraternalities of past glorious pistol operas like A Better Tomorrow and Hard-Boiled, and ends with In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai's super-sumptuous serenade to the spaces between romance. That's the version everyone knows – the story of the little movie colony that could, and did, reinvent both the Hollywood action spectacle and the European art-house "classic" on its own terms; the version that climaxes with Jackie Chan becoming as famous as Chris Rock while everyone from Tsui Hark to Miramax's Harvey Weinstein tries to figure out how they missed the boat on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

What about that other Hong Kong cinema – the one that, for the intents of this discussion, was once typified by Stanley Kwan, the greatest Hong Kong filmmaker ever to have happily fallen between the cracks of the former Crown Colony's cinema's staggering international success? There was, after all, a time when Woo and Wong were still, as far as most of the world was concerned, just another pair of exotic auteurs on the film-festival circuit, and Kwan – whose latest film, Lan Yu, a ballad of sexual dependency set against the backdrop of China's political and economic reversals of fortune during the late '80s, opens at the Castro this week – was their tripodal third term. But while the career courses of his two contemporaries are now common knowledge, the two extremes of Kwan's early legacy – a counterbalancing of edgy and uneven ensemble pieces like Love unto Waste and Full Moon in New York with women-centered masterpieces like Rouge, Actress, and Red Rose, White Rose – have faded precipitously into the past. The loss is ours: long before Maggie Cheung was the tragic cheongsam mannequin of In the Mood for Love or the ex-Mrs. Olivier Assayas, she won a much deserved Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance as silent-film star Ruan Lingyu, once known as the "Chinese Garbo," in 1991's Actress – a film that continues to top lists of the greatest foreign films never to have enjoyed an American theatrical release.

What has always unified the dual impulses of Kwan's filmmaking – much like the broad middle spectrum of try-anything experimentation that allowed talents like Wong and Woo to find their feet – is his determination to make every project, no matter how emotionally eager to engage with audiences, speak directly from some deeply personal corner of his heart. When asked by the British Film Institute to direct an installment of its History of Cinema series in 1995, Kwan even went so far as to use the occasion to produce Yang +/- Yin: Gender in Chinese Cinema, a film as much about Tsui Hark's flying cross-dressers and the late Chang Cheh's sinewy swordsmen as it is about the director's own decision to "come out" about his sexuality to the notoriously reactionary H.K. press. The films he's made since then may seem, from a surface perspective, to have veered away from the Cukorian, "women's weepie" excesses for which he once seemed destined to be remembered, but in fact, Kwan has remained resolutely true to form: without sacrificing the deeply personal register of political consciousness and idiosyncratic aesthetics that characterizes all of his best work, Lan Yu is a film for all audiences, the straight-forward story of fraught but undeniable love between a hard-shell entrepreneur and a soft-centered country boy that will tear your heart apart.

Based on an "Internet novel" whose chapters where published sequentially, then unified under the title Beijing Story and signed pseudonymously by one "Beijing Comrade" ("comrade" being Chinese slang for "gay"), Lan Yu concerns the rise-and-fall-and-rise-again relationship between well-off businessman Chen Handong (played by East Palace, West Palace's Hu Jun) and architecture student Lan Yu (celebrated newcomer Liu Ye). For the privileged Handong, a fling with a virginal farm boy is nothing so unusual; for the quickly smitten Lan Yu, on whom Handong showers ever more expensive gifts but nothing so costly as actual devotion, a few nights of passion portend a lifetime partnership. Set in a series of darkened rooms and developed through a series of devastating ellipses, the film manages everywhere to balance a sense of the intimate and the historically inevitable, as Kwan and editor (and longtime Wong collaborator) William Chang establish an extraordinarily restrained but ever poignant system of micro-parallels and macro-contradictions throughout. Eventually, even a 30-second flurry of cuts during the exchange of a scarf between lovers on a wintry afternoon comes to seem as devastating as the politically fraught episode in which Handong, desperate to reunite with Lan Yu on the evening of June 4, 1989, finds his Mercedes slowed to a halt by a torrent of bicycle riders fleeing through the backstreets around Tiananmen Square.