Lan Yu

Beijing, 1988. Successful commodities trader Handong (Hu) takes his one-night stand with architecture student Lan Yu (Liu) very lightly, but it was a life-changing experience for the boy. One major obstacle after another gets in the way of the two of them becoming a couple: Handong's compulsive promiscuity, Handong's impulsive (and short-lived) marriage, Lan Yu's involvement in the Tiananmen Square demos of 1989. They end up together anyway, only to find that fate isn't always kind to true lovers. Kwan's adaptation of an anonymous novel published only on the Internet (it galvanised the vast underground gay community in 1996 and established a new kind of samizdat publishing in China) is courageously simple and frank. The film eliminates most of the novel's near-porno sex scenes and tones down the melodrama, producing a matter of fact and emotionally truthful account of a relationship marked by its time and place. Superbly acted, too.