What Time Is It Here?
By Mark Asch
Blue Sun Palace
Dir. Constance Tsang, U.S., Dekanalog
Constance Tsang’s debut feature looks and moves like strains of East Asian slow cinema you’d expect to see at a European festival: remote, meditatively paced single takes; characters speaking in Mandarin and Min Nan but mostly expressing their intimate feelings through physical touch; and the presence of Tsai Ming-liang’s lifelong muse Lee Kang-sheng. But Blue Sun Palace was shot in Flushing, Queens, and its subject is the grief and struggle of migrants living on the margins—material historically more associated with handheld, hardscrabble humanism. Like the recent Mad Bills to Pay—a Bronx tale whose locked-off framings repay its director’s avowed debt to Pedro Costa and which also played in this year’s New Directors/New Films festival—Blue Sun Palace represents a new aesthetic vernacular for stories of the New York City working class, betraying international inspiration more than Sundance-school neorealism.
Lee plays Cheung, a migrant who was a businessman in Taiwan but now works as a manual laborer, sending home meager remunerations which are the only subject of conversation during the rare FaceTime calls he takes on a smoke break or from a lonely bedroom. He’s introduced on a date with Didi (Haipeng Xu), eating chicken in a local Chinese restaurant that hasn’t yet been discovered by Instagram foodies. Often impassive in his films with Tsai, Lee here initially appears soft-spoken and distracted, but making an effort, enthusing about the food, sweet-talking his date, and clearing away the fog of his sadness with perfect spit-shined moments of sly flirtation. In his most famous films, Lee is a totemic presence as much as an actor playing a character, but he here uses his natural recessiveness and reserves of charm to evoke a beaten-down man with a few embers of tenderness and carnal appetite unextinguished.
Didi and her best friend, Amy (Ke-Xi Wu), are likewise separated from their families, but they have each other and are saving up money to open a restaurant. For now, though, they work in a massage parlor down a flight of stairs off Flushing Main Street, where the laser-printed “No Sexual Services” sign taped to the door does not stop the customers from asking, begging, wheedling—or Didi and Amy from acquiescing, out of a commingled sense of financial pragmatism and intimidation. The ambience of the parlor and the rhythms of the filmmaking—the soothing diegetic New Age-y water-bubbler music; the patient attention to repetitive motion; the awareness of vulnerable flesh and rituals of care—give the massage scenes a gentleness at odds with the climate of matter-of-fact exploitation. Tsang underplays this, but it’s fascinating to watch the transformation of clients from nude and passive moaners to fully clothed men capable of weaponizing their superior conversational English.)
Tsang does not foreground politics, but her film adds a perspective to recent screen depictions of sex work—here it is enfolded into the contingencies of life as a migrant detached from wider communities. The work is discussed in hushed euphemisms or not at all; solidarity comes in the form of a home-cooked meal whipped up by Amy from a nostalgic recipe. The characters’ immigration status is never clarified, but Amy and Didi live with the massage parlor’s other employees, seemingly in or upstairs from their workplace, in shared accommodations with very strict rules about visitors, all of which raises the suggestion of human trafficking.
The characters are almost never shown outside. Tsang shot the film over “18 days or so” in the neighborhood where she grew up; the Flushing locations—basement-level massage parlors, paper-plate restaurants, and newish but shabby-looking apartments with a few stock-photo posters or promotional calendars on otherwise bare walls—are lit in white-blue artificial light, a bubble that seems at once sterile and murky in Norm Li’s 16mm cinematography. Often, the camera observes the action from a static position one room over, a curtain or divider in the foreground making a proscenium that subtly drives home everyone’s total lack of privacy.
A leaky basement ceiling that torments Amy is but one tactile reminder of the characters’ material circumstances, yet it’s also an echo of Tsai’s The Hole. Tsai’s films are evoked throughout: Lee receives a massage to alleviate his neck pain (a significant plot point in The River and Days); there is a late extended tearful close-up à la Vive l’amour. Blue Sun Palace’s title card appears more than 30 minutes into the film—a classic trope of the Hubert Bals Fund school of fest-circuit formalism, a durational and obliquely poetic early 21st-century house style heavily influenced by Tsai—just after a moment of violence that leaves the surviving characters even more acutely displaced. If concerns of alienation, spiritual and affective numbness, and the possibility of healing through sensual contact often animate Tsai’s films, they are often explored through elaborate metaphors; Tsang’s writing is much more conventional, finding plangency in the tentative connections made by new lovers in a karaoke booth or fellow migrant workers over a meal. Her characters appear grief-stricken but cautiously hopeful, rather than blocked and inexpressive—they are people, rather than gestures, and behave relatably, if also predictably.
All of which is to say that the DNA of Blue Sun Palace is part Chinese auteur film, part hyperlocal indie—a hybrid identity apt for the characters, who, though living in America, have as yet only staked out the most fragile, ambivalent of claims to their part of it. The film’s final scenes, which expand its scope further along the Eastern Seaboard, offer two divergent paths for its characters. Some plant roots in this country; some disappear into it.