Locally, this film played to mixed critical reviews, but I am absolutely enamored by Stanley Kwan's brilliant, understated film style. While LAN YU is a fairly ordinary love story, a rich man falls for a younger, more humble male novice from the country, and what was supposed to be a one night stand turns out to be the subject of this 9 year film exploration, taken from the popular e-novel BEIJING STORY released anonymously on the Internet in 1996, and while one would believe that this story has been told over and over again in nearly every culture, the way that this story is filmed is anything but ordinary. Stanley Kwan is simply a superb director, visually stunning with layers of rich texture, subtle with very dark interiors, extremely detailed with only glimpses of color, a slow measured pace that examines the psychological inner needs of these characters, both of whom are superb in this film, Jun Hu as the older businessman and especially Liu Ye as the younger character of Lan Yu. The obvious comparisons would be Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-wei's HAPPY TOGETHER, which has much more razzle dazzle and high energy than this film, or perhaps Leslie Cheung and Fengyi Zhang in Chen Kaige's FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, which has a much more broad and epic subject matter. Here the film confines itself to two men almost exclusively, and their screen chemistry IS the film, as how they react and what they have to say to one another is remarkably moving in it's brevity as well as it's honesty. I found the last half of Hou Hsiao-hsien's 2001 film MILLENNIUM MAMBO was very much in the style of Stanley Kwan, the energy simply stops and the film crawls into a ghost-like crevasse, a mind-numbing, desolate despair, while LAN YU, also filmed in 2001, adds Hou's ritual of letting his camera hover over a festive table of people eating and catching the power of human interplay in their most ordinary moments. My chief complaint is how the ending misses the mark. Maybe I'm missing something here, but the entire film builds to an emotional intensity that simply dissipates, like letting the air out of a balloon, and I, for one, was disappointed. Again, while a simple story, this film has extraordinary emotional complexity which makes this one of the best films I've seen this year.
Review of Lan Yu
