Enter the Clowns

Shot on DV in five days, Cui's underground feature says that everything you know about sexual identity and gender orientation is wrong. Assorted straight, gay and in-between Beijingers act out a series of loosely linked vignettes derived from Cui's own banned novel. Xiao Bo lets his dying mother (or is that his father?) give him a blowjob, a boy fends off sexual advances from a foreign man who offers him a room, Nana (evidently inspired by a Fassbinder film) changes gender in a vain attempt to please the guy who didn't like her as a boy... you get the picture. It ends on an elegiac note with Xiao Bo, naked, reading aloud a religio-erotic sci-fi scene from Cui's book. But its queering of everyday life in Beijing is anything but literary, and its indie rough edges actually sharpen the perversity. Playful, provoking and sometimes very funny, it gets Queer Chinese Cinema off to a heady start.