Yuanhao Zhao | 两个人 (Two Men) / 2017

the marks of a society

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yuanhao Zhao (director) 两个人 (Two Men) / 2017 [9 minutes]

 

Chinese director Yuanhao Zhao’s Two Men is basically a dance piece performed under a remarkably constructed circular iron cage that might be read as a metaphor for a house, a workplace, or a prison.

     Both within and out of this massive cage are men, workmen it is apparent covered with grease and tar, the result of the machinery with which they are engaged, represented in a series of quick images in the early frames of the film, a circular piston that looks almost like a dildo and whole chucks of solid tar. A man with a bucket provides grease to the men who are still free from its bodily smears.

     In the middle of this construction, however, are two men, washed free of the black substance, who proceed to perform what can only be described as an intense dance of love, beginning with the simple entwining of legs and arms, but soon moving to embraces, kisses, and a series of wrestling-like encounters suggesting sexual copulation.

 

     Throughout, the other men watch in complete awe, a couple vaguely imitating the gestures of the central couple, but most of them simply watching with wide-eyed wonderment as they slather on more layers of tar over their bodies.

      Who is this special couple and why are they seemingly exempted from the rest of the work force? The very question we as the audience ask, seems to be the same query of the on-screen observers who suddenly begin to encircle the pair, moving around them rather threateningly in a ring. But they soon move in, pressing upon and leaning in on the pure unmarked pair, discoloring their bodies with the grease and tar from their own torsos.

      The procedure does not appear as violent as much as it proceeds out of a sense of forcing those who are different to become one of them, workmen with the marks and signs of their occupations.

       One of the lovers escapes, moving toward the camera. A huge laugh upon his face can be interpreted in at least two ways, the smile seen as an expression of having been freed from his difference or, and far more likely, as a kind of hysterical smile of horrific recognition of the specialness, pleasures, and joys of what he has just lost.

       Two Men, performed with full orchestra, is otherwise a silent movie in which everything is expressed in bodily movement and in the set. But what it says is a powerful as a loud spoken drama of shouted-out homophobic slogans. Among mankind, there is inexplicably almost always a need to destroy what appears as difference. The marks of a society must be painted upon every man’s face.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).