By Brian Hu

One of the most musical of Chinese filmmakers, Cui Zi'en shoots his latest work as a gentle hymnal rather than an austere requiem. The result is a heartfelt paean to brotherly love.

In both form and content, videomaker Cui Zi'en is at the forefront of his art in mainland China today. I've only seen four works by the prolific director, novelist, and critic, and all of them, I can proudly say, are unlike anything I've seen before. The Old Testament is a triptych of personal and familial challenges to gay life in contemporary China, with each segment followed by a solemn choral of tragedy and death sung by the characters and the director himself. In a death-defying pair of long hand-held takes, Narrow Margin explores issues of faith as it relates to a quartet of naked aliens who arrive in China only to confront a posse of hostile earthlings. Night Scene is more traditional; utilizing both fiction and non-fiction techniques, Cui observes the underground world of male prostitutes.

Cui's latest, Refrain, which I saw when Cui was invited to the UCLA campus by the graduate student group China Forum, is my favorite of the four, because for all of its experimental techniques (its 108 minute duration is comprised of 11 long takes), the emotional quotient is the highest I've seen in any of his films, if not all of Chinese fiction filmmaking in the last year or two. In anybody else's hands, the content could easily lend itself to exploitation and sensationalism. A mentally retarded twenty-something is stricken with the desire to help his younger brother, who is dying of AIDS. However, the elder brother is unable to formulate a coherent way to express his concern and love, except through Catholic rituals and through sexual contact. Incestual suggestion is pervasive through the film (the brothers don't wear clothes while at home) and it inevitably but persuasively culminates in a climax that is shocking, and then moving.

Each long take begins and ends with a fade to black, similar to Hou Hsiao-hsien's organization in Flowers of Shanghai. But whereas Hou's film presents each segment as a perfectly realized, meticulously designed tableau of prostitutes, fashions, and late-Qing silverware, Refrain treats each scene as dream-like snapshots or diary entries of these two brothers in their last days together. While one or two of the shots contain breathtakingly aesthetic lighting and framing (particularly one where the brothers lie on railroad tracks and another where the elder brother lights candles in the dark), most of the shots have an improvisatory quality, as if the cameraman were moving to the rhythms of the actors rather than to the blocking or storyboard of the director. The result is a video that drifts through scenes rather than dwelling in them. Some of the scenes are claustrophobic (for instance the early ones in their apartment), but the feel of the work as a whole is anything but stuffy. There's something poetic about the organic movement from within the apartment walls to outdoors, in tall grass and along railroad tracks, and then back again; the scenes pass like impressionistic stanzas in a poem about loss rather than hefty chapters in a novel about death.

Unlike many recent experimental works in long takes and long shots, what happens in the narrative is quite significant in Refrain. But because of their simplicity, the film never slips into familiar narrative patterns of heavy melodrama. In one scene, the dying younger brother writes his will as his elder brother playfully writes his own. In another scene, the dying younger brother has his elder brother lie down with him on railroad tracks; for the elder of the two, it is about having faith in one's brother and being at peace despite the ominous sounds of oncoming trains, while for the younger brother, it is about resigning to the sense of teetering on the brink of death.

As in many of Cui's films, Catholic imagery plays a central role in Refrain. The elder brother doesn't understand the symbolic significance of Catholic rituals. He knows the words "This is my blood, this is my body," and that wine and bread, when sacrificed by Jesus, have redemptive properties. So he attempts to cut his arteries, to spill his blood and save his brother. Or he dissects a loaf of bread, using scissors to cut out a perfect white circle, which he will solemnly feed to his brother. The corporeality of these scenes is heightened by the eating and the drinking, and we feel in our bodies his own sacrifice, however naive and ineffectual. And as such, we -- in an odd kind of transubstantiation -- come to feel the symbolic act of faith and fraternal sacrifice through his bodily acts.

This comes to a head in the scene of incest: a disturbing, passionate, grotesque, and erotic moment of unadulterated love. As Berenice Reynaud has noted in reference to Cui's previous works, both Catholicism and homosexuality are fraught with ambiguities in regards to the symbolic role of flesh and the body. In this extraordinary scene, candles are lit and the wallpaper exudes the ambiance of a church, and the men make love in a dark edge of the room, the ultimate state of emotional and spiritual transcendence. Morality is rendered irrelevant; what we see and feel instead is the intense desire to save and to love.

This could be Cui's breakthrough work on the international stage. Several of his other films -- Feeding Boys, The Old Testament, and Night Scene -- have been released on DVD in the states by Water Bearer Films, a small home video distributor specializing in queer cinema from around the world. His works are gaining momentum in the festival circuit, especially due to the courageous efforts of the Vancouver Film Festival, which have programmed Cui's pieces in each of the past few years. His parables of desire intersect with a number of niche markets -- queer, Asian, underground -- but it seems to me that Refrain is more emotionally accessible (while still philosophically challenging) because it refuses to complicate the issues with a number of secondary characters and subplots -- the sort of narrative texture that normally would allow a film like this to penetrate a diversity of markets. The long-take experimental style usually "opens" the text to more meanings and associations, but here, it minimizes complication by making the human connections and emotional yearning more transparent and focused. For these reasons, Refrain and parts of The Old Testament remind me of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc for simultaneously being organic, mobile, and cosmological as well as rigid in their visually intense depictions of sacrifice and tragedy.

Published: Friday, November 30, 2007