Blue Sun Palace (2024)

I had no idea where I was going, but I was hoping a bit for an atmospheric portrait of Chinese immigrants in New York. Well, this didn't turn out to be that. The film is quite bare in its setup, almost entirely in Chinese, with many indoor scenes and many backgrounds out of focus—the film could have taken place anywhere and didn't even need to be about immigrants. For me, there was simply too little that was engaging in terms of atmosphere and visuals. The slow camerawork and the many close-up shots don't exactly help matters either. I'm not giving the film a very low score because there was a beautiful shot or moment every now and then, and the style is maintained quite well and consistently, but it simply isn't my taste. 2.0*.

Translated from Dutch · View original

I couldn't really do much with this. In New York, an immigrant from Taiwan dates a Chinese immigrant who works in a massage parlor, and when she drops out, he dates a colleague and friend of hers, after which she gets tired of her job and leaves. The film is supposed to say something about immigration – that immigrants seek family-like relationships in the new country – but I found nothing in the film that isn't also normal for non-immigrants: friendships form at work there too, many don't find true love, and people get tired of their jobs and move. I actually couldn't find anything interesting in the film: not in the visuals, not in the plot, and I couldn't even find any themes, so the film feels like a personal anecdote from the director's life.

Translated from Dutch · View original

A slow-paced romantic drama with a 30-minute prologue in which Cheung [Kang-sheng Lee] enters into a relationship with his masseuse Didi [Haipeng Xu]. At the end of the prologue, that romance comes to an abrupt end and the story jumps forward in time. Amy [Ke-Xi Wu], a former colleague of Didi's, now meets Cheung, and the entire story (except for one important detail) repeats itself once more. No action, little dialogue, many lengthy silences that Tsang likely finds meaningful, but which in fact drag things out extremely. During the credits, we see Cheung smoking a cigarette. The rest of the film is rarely more interesting, despite the immersive performances of the three lead actors.

Translated from Dutch · View original