New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

LEADING LEE: THE TIME OF HUAN NAN (2023)

TRAILER

This is a woozy, beautiful Taiwan film full of "BL" content, meaning soft core gayness, and focusing on three homoerotically filmed handsome young men and a vibrant young woman who bond as eternal "brothers" (even though one is a sister) in the vicinity of the eponymous Huan Nan Taipei food market, a traditional landmark whose rooftops, some in the film say, provide the best panoramic nighttime views of the whole of Taipei. The film is both epic, and intimate. And intensely colored, perhaps a little too much so. Above all it is replete with young male eye candy.

There isn't really that much about the market. There are a lot of swoony closeups of smooth male faces, torsos and butts, and intimate sexy closeups of a rugby game and more than one sequence of nude male bathing in all of which the homoerotic aspect is more than hinted at, though there is no male kissing - not any kissing, in fact - or sex. The emphasis is on longing and sadness. There is a heartbreaking, as well as slightly confusing, sequence of the three young men plunging riskily into a dangerous surf, with a teasing suggestion that a tragedy might be averted, though it's only a tease. The young woman stands by.

Did I say this is a time travel movie? It is, and reminded me of the equally woozy and soft-core erotic 2022 French Netflix time-travel series "Les 7 Vies de Léa," "The 7 Lives of Lea," which involves teenagers and also goes back 30 years to 1991. Something like that, only not as complicated, happens here. One of the young men, Chen Yao-hua (Hsia Teng Hung), the protagonist, if you like, is Back from the Future, visiting for a lengthy stay from 2022, a time of masks and Covid. At the present time, as the film begins, he works in the butcher stall of his father Chen Bao Ding (Edison Song) in the market. When he's up on the roof trying to persuade his father to stop dancing up there with a sword, he's suddenly transported to 1991 when his father was young, 30 years earlier.

In most of the film we see Chen Yao-hua, who becomes known as Liu Hung-hui, being taken for a highschooler who had gone missing, at a time when his father is young and handsome. And he's also in love with another man, something that wasn't at all okay - as it is, relatively, in Yao-hua's time, since in 2019 same sex marriage was legalized in Taiwan. Gay desire existed back then too, of course, but met with serious obstacles. Yao-hua encounters his young father and there are intimate, homoerotic moments even, perhaps oddly, between them. Yao-hua also sees his older father when he gets back back to 2022 and gives him a bath, also intimate.

Yu Kang Min (Wang Yu Ping), the young woman, plays an important role in the bonding of the Four Brothers of Yuan Nan. Yao-hua falls for her, while realizing that his younger father-to-be is gay and in love with another of what becomes the foursome, Chang An-jian (Chu Meng-hsuan).

Yao-hua becomes concerned with a developing tragedy, the disappearance of Chang An-jian. But this is not a world in which the visitor from today is able to alter events. Things get tricky for Yao-hua (and for us) when he returns to the present. It turns out he is now seen to have been gone for thirty years. It's complicated, and unclear. The film doesn't wind itself up well.

A review of the film by Brian Hioe in The Cinema Escapist confirms this about the weakness of the ending. Hioe is more knowledgeable about gay-themed Taiwanese films and lists and compares them. Though he finds faults in this one, notably a too didactic and explanatory section toward the end, a too obvious effort to highlight the famous market, and the failure to "stick the ending," yet he believes The Time of Huan Nan to be one of the best recent wave of Taiwanese LGBT-themed films. He feels that it is "well shot and excels at pacing"; that the acting "carries the movie," with all the principals "having excellent chemistry" and "oozing charisma." Some would argue that there are a tad too many intimate closeups, but we are invited to admire the handsome young men, and we do. Much though this may, by US or Western standards, seem somewhat timid about the sexual side of homosexuality - the step back to a more restricted time may be meant to justify that - still the film is full of warmth, sensuality, and one might almost say love. It may be considered audacious in combining gay themes with a traditional food market.

The Time of Huan Nan 環南時候,139 min., debuted in the Kaohsiung Film Festival Oct. 8, 2023, and opened in Taiwan May 31, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Saturday July 13, 6:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57