By Aynne Kokas
With pomp and poetry, the quirky Cut-Sleeve Boys opens doors in international film festival scene for Britain's gay Chinese scene.
Ray Leung's Cut-Sleeve Boys, billed as Britain's first Chinese gay film, builds an important space for a new set of identities to be portrayed on the big screen. However, the film's camp silliness and hypertrophied image fixation do much to ensure that Leung's characters occupy no more cultural space than a pretty waif at a crowded cocktail party.
Cut-Sleeve Boys' Mel and Ash, two long-time friends and fixtures of the London gay scene, are often as lovable and bright as their fluorescent shirts and endless bling. Yet, the director's steadfast determination to keep things light, with the noble intention of presenting gay lifestyles as part of the status quo rather than as a condition to be forever ruminated upon, ends up creating a drag in the second part of the film.
 |
Mel, played with cruel panache by Singaporean transplant Steven Lim, suffers from no longer being the most beautiful boy at the party, combined with the pressure of a naïve live-in boyfriend who yearns for commitment. Producer Chowee Leow's Ash, on the other hand, is unable to reconcile his irresistible draw toward Asian kitsch (think dolls and Orientalist silks) with his desire to attract a macho partner. At their foundation, both story lines offer interesting material with which to examine struggles for self-acceptance and personal growth. However, Ash's dabbling as a red fringe-wearing transvestite, Mel's lessons on how to wear the new season's watch, and the two men's repeated remembrances of their university's Asia-Pacific beauty pageant, shift widely between touching personal conflicts, disturbingly shallow asides and overly self-conscious nostalgia. Leung is determined to allow the viewer to appreciate his characters for all of their endearing, often humorous, flaws. However, rapid shifts from outrageous camp to earnest personal reflection impart a form of emotional whiplash to the audience.
Leung valiantly tries to reconcile the layered implications of being gay, British and Chinese. With the film's title, Cut-Sleeve Boys, Leung seems to be foregrounding his film's “Chinese-ness” by taking the film's title from the well-known poetic allusion duan xiu, or cut-sleeve, to represent the beauty of Chinese homosexuality. According to legend, Han Dynasty Emperor Ai, when sleeping with his favorite male concubine, cut off the sleeve of his own shirt so as to be able to rise from bed, but not disturb his lover. Leung's use of the story reflects his interest in presenting an accepted, historicized version of Chinese homosexuality. Historicizing the contemporary Chinese gay scene is appealing, and linguistically, the reference also fits in within an established tradition of employing the term “cut-sleeve” (duan xiu) as shorthand for male homosexuality in the Chinese-speaking world. Further, the use of a translated Chinese term as the film's English title reflects the cultural complexity of being Chinese abroad. One can interpret the title to suggest both the impact of transnational Chinese gay culture, but also the looming specter of Chinese history on identity overseas. The complex sentiments embodied within the film's title, then, only make the work's failure to deliver a series of fully nuanced performances even more frustrating. In the midst of trying not taking his character's lives with excess gravitas as a way to demonstrate their ordinariness, Leung bestows them with all the tragicomedy of a particularly disappointing night at the club.
 |
Cut-Sleeve Boys does offer a window into a world often unseen by outsiders, and as a forerunner, has numerous challenges of representation to undertake. For Cut-Sleeve Boys' faults, the film is an important step toward the quotidian cinematic representation of a broader range of people. With a world premiere in January at the 35th Film Festival at Rotterdam, an Asian premiere in February at the Bangkok Film Festival, and additional screenings in Berlin and Taipei, Leung is bringing the perspectives of an under-represented group to the international stage.
Perhaps even more notably, in Taipei, in addition to being screened as part of the Global Chinese Film and Video section of the Taipei International Film Festival, the film also ran later in the summer as part of a short-run, three film “love” film festival, alongside two European romantic comedies in a mainstream theater. Theaters in Taipei periodically run short “festivals,” sets of three or more films that run for a limited period of time, and are generally organized thematically. Taipei's mini-festivals are designed to offer consumers alternatives to commercial Hollywood fare through simple, cost-effective measures. Rather than being relegated only to forums that celebrate sexual orientation or ethnicity, Cut-Sleeve Boys' greatest success may have been the film's pairing with run of the mill romantic comedy genre material. In its limited Taipei commercial screening, and hopefully, in future markets, Cut-Sleeve Boys is able to break out of the rarefied film festival world to be a simple story of love, loss, and search for the self.
Official site: http://www.cutsleeveboys.com (http: //www.cutsleeveboys.com)
Published: Thursday, September 7, 2006
