Bishonen

Walking along rows and rows of DVD racks in Quiapo, I picked up an 8-movie DVD made ostensibly in China. I sometimes have an anti-Hollywood attitude towards movies, such that I deliberately look for Spanish, French, South American and Chinese titles.

This 8-movie set included Peony Express and Bishonen, by a film director named Yonfan. Peony is extremely weird: it's a regional Chinese opera equivalent of a Hollywood musical a la Gigi. I couldn't finish it. The singing, with all those piercing high notes, gave me headaches. The other titles, like Hongkong Playboys, Twinkle something (I forgot the others) are extremely crappy, I couldn't get past 5 minutes before pushing the stop button.

Bishonen, however is different. It's a gay movie, and I didn't expect it to be such because it featured a beautiful Hong Kong actress (I forgot her name) who I found out later, only did a cameo appearance.

I wasn't really shocked. It wasn't the first time I saw movies that had a gay theme. First movie I saw that literally shocked and had me wanting to strangle the filmmaker was a Neil Jordan movie, The Crying Game. Something to do with IRAs. I never suspected the girl to be well, a boy, not until she was shown to have a penis! Ugh!

Next was a Daniel-Day Lewis indie starrer, My Beautiful Laundrette, shown at the UP Film Centre. I couldn't remember what the movie was all about, but he kissed some Pakistani guy (ngek, eh di ang baho nun!)

And then my Sociology teacher required us to write a review on Ang Lee's Wedding Banquet. This one was very funny, you know, the foibles of people leading double lives (straight outside, gay inside). Ang Lee wasn't yet the big time Hollywood director that he is today.

And then of course, Brokeback Mountain by the same director. Unfortunately, I slept through most of it, so I don't even know much about the movie enough to say whether I liked it or not.

Bishonen is like a feel-good romance movie for gays. It's a fantasy romance very much like most Meg Ryan flicks. It's obviously not meant for a larger audience. You see, the director Yonfan assembled Hong Kong's most attractive men and crafted a gay movie on them. And to make it dramatic, he had to kill one of the main characters at the end simply to milk the tearducts of his vulnerable target gay audience, prompting (I'm sure) some of the moviegoers, with matching sobs, to lament, "Why, why should gay movies always end up in tragedy? Can't they ride into the sunset and live happily ever after?".

It's interesting but I couldn't emphatize with the characters at all.