C.B. Yi | 金錢男孩 (Hanyu Pinyin) (Moneyboys) / 2021

the fly enticing the spider to dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

C.B. Yi (screenwriter and director) 金錢男孩 (Hanyu Pinyin) (Moneyboys) / 2021

 

In terms of its visual beauty, one might characterize Taiwanese-Austrian director C.B. Yi’s freshman movie as taking its cue from the great Taiwanese master, Tsai Ming-liang without the long narrative sense of time of Tsai’s recent films.

 

     This work, about young male prostitutes in mainland China (although filmed in Taiwan to escape government repression) reveals not only the difficulties boy prostitutes discover throughout the world, but the particular complexities of living such a life in China, where at any moment gay hustlers might be arrested, beaten, and banned, often having to leave for other communities when word reaches their shamed families. Yet Moneyboys is also very much a love story, despite the focus of love for the young hero of this work Lian Fei (Kai Ko) altering over time.

    It begins when the far more conservative Fei is living with another prostitute Han Xiaolai (JC Lin), who is far more open and sexually experimental than his neophyte hustler lover, who we see in the very first scene thanking another experienced boy for including him in a threesome, perhaps his first job. Unlike the experienced Xiaolai, Fei cannot afford to offend his clients since almost all the money he makes he sends back to his family in a small village of Southern China, without revealing, obviously, his source of income.

 

    The couple seem near perfect however, particularly in their love scenes, and one could imagine an entire film centered around the vicissitudes of the two in their sweet domestic conflicts. But in fact, these early scenes where we get a sense that there may be enough money in prostitution to actually afford these young men a good life, but, as in any such a role, there are always obvious dangers. From one of his early outings with a john to whom the experienced Xiaolai has argued he should deny his services, Fei returns home having been beaten.

      No sooner has he begun to heal than Xialoai goes out looking for the well-known customer, finds him, and begins to beat him with a pipe. The battle spills over in several neighborhoods, as the abuser and his friends gang up on Xiaolai, running him down on the streets and taking retribution by breaking one of his knees while also thoroughly beating him.

      Xiaolai can hardly crawl back to the housing complex and, in the meantime, before he even reaches home the police arrive to their apartment. Having heard the cries of neighbors, Fei painfully has left his bed and gone into the walkways, suddenly observing the police making their way to his room. Unable to return for fear of arrest and even imprisonment, he is forced the leave the city and his beloved Xiaolai behind, who we later learn has been crippled for life.

      If one might have imagined that the beginner Fei would not have returned to hustling, we are very mistaken as he discover, five years later and more mature, he is now working with a high-class clientele regularly and has made enough money to live in spacious apartment in his new city, surrounded by close friends, with one of whom he apparently shares the place.

 

      We also see an entire encounter with a handsome client, with whom Fei plays roles, treating him almost as if he were his married husband, bringing his sandals and his robe when he enters the apartment, formally serving him tea, and after being fucked even refusing the suggestion that he himself ejaculate, saying that his friend “is the star of the show,” clearly a self-effacing Fei that we do not see in his most of his everyday activities, but which is evidently an aspect of his inner self. We do observe that side of Fei somewhat in his relations with his family to whom he is now sending substantial amounts of money and whom he regularly calls to check up on.        

     And in that sense, Fei continues to be a more conservative force than some of his friends, such as his roommate Chen Wei (Qiheng Sun). When Fei asks how much he plans to gift one of the gay friends, Xiangdong (Yan-Ze Lu) who is suddenly giving up hustling to marry a woman, Lulu (Chloe Maaayan), his best friend refuses to even think about since Xiangdong “already switched sides,” and it’s only a “fake” wedding, while Fei believes it’s only right to perform the traditional custom, even if for Lulu’s parent’s sake, they’re being used as covers.

     Fei’s friend, who has evidently been a lover of Xiangdong, gets drunk at their wedding party and demands that they drink to the bride several times, embarrassing not only the groom, the bride, and her family, but the other friends; but at the same time his intrusions make clear the hypocrisy demanded of many gay men in Chinese culture, forced to eventually pretend to abandon they gay lives in order to satisfy the demands of parents who even pay them to engage, if unknowingly, in the fraud of traditional heterosexual marriage.

      After the ceremony another friend summarizes the situation: “Xiangdong did it right. He quit after earning enough money. He finds a fake marriage to keep his family satisfied.” The same young man describes an incident of a couple of days earlier when he and Lulu encountered a street singer, who claimed that he was once the most successful money boy in Changsha. But fate was not on his side. He fought for someone and would up crippled. He spent two years in prison, reports Fei’s friend. “I heard it was for his lover. But when he was arrested, his lover disappeared.”

      Obviously, it is Fei’s Xiaolai of whom he is speaking or at least a case so similar that it puts Fei into a deep funk.

      In the very next frames, we see Fei in bed, eating an apple, while an older, portly man, obviously a john sits on the edge of the bed. When he finally moves in for sexual contact and Fei turns toward him, he calls in policeman as the “client,” identifying himself as a detective slips handcuffs on Fei.

       We don’t know how Fei escapes the consequences, but a short while later, perhaps to simply escape his current city for a while, the young hustler returns home to Southern China to visit his ailing grandfather. Once there, he is greeted lovingly by his sister, with home he celebrates his return by burning large sums of money he has brought along as a tribute to his dead mother. His father and even his grandfather, who at first doesn’t recognize him as his grandson, all seem delighted by his return. But at a dinner party later that evening, the uncles bring up, as surely they have in the past, the fact that he is still not married. As Fei attempts to ignore their instance that it’s time he found a woman, their comments become more insistent and louder and finally turn into anger and violence as they report the shame they and the rest of his family have hand to endure for the reports of his arrest for prostitution. A fight entails, as Fei escapes the family home the next morning to return to a spot where as a young man growing up in the isolated village he had often gone to swim.

      There he is enjoyed by an old schoolmate Liang Long (Bai Yufan), who he has met with by accident on his arrival home. Long, a somewhat handsome and awkward youth gradually, in a slow conversation of revelation and some resentment, reports that he had gone off after graduation for other jobs but had not been happy working and returned home where things were better. But as the vague conversation and flirtation continues, he admits that he has gone in search of Fei, first in Changsha, where he could not find him, and later in the city where Fei now lives. Going even further, he admits that he too would like to be a money boy, to live the kind of life his old friend now lives. Fei not only attempts to discourage him, but attempts to break off communications as he leaves his family behind, knowing now that there is no return. They were apparently very happy to accept the money he sent, as long as they didn’t know its source. It is another example of the kind of hypocrisy that exists not only in China but in all such cultures where the migrant sends home money without being questioned about its source, but cannot live the values of his old culture if he is to survive.

      Fei is now at a sort of standstill, a young man aging that doesn’t have the sums saved up as did Xiangdong, having done what he thought was the right thing, supporting his family, spending on friends when necessary, participating in traditional patterns of financial sacrifice. Things become even worse when Long suddenly shows up, demanding Fei help him get into “the business.”

       Fei refuses, finding a job working in a restaurant instead, where he is given a back bedroom that looks worse than sleazy motel room, while he has caught a glimpse of Fei’s luxurious apartment.

 

      In the midst of Fei’s suffering, Long rebels, doing damage to the restaurant and abusing a customer. Fei convinces the restaurateur to give Long his job back and himself pays for the damages, but Long refuses, despite Fei’s instance that he pay according to the rules of Chinese culture. As critic Philip Brasor has succinctly summarizes the Long’s argument: “as he [Long] so pointedly explains, every job he’s ever had involves ‘selling my body,’ so he might as well get paid as much as possible for it.”

       Furious for the fact that he is now responsible, in his sense of intense guilt, for bringing such an innocent into his world, Fei attempts to once more dismiss and also violently get rid of the innocent, sending him back to his Southern village. But Long also clearly has fallen in love with Fei as well, and what has become clear is that his odd sense of humor is the perfect balance for Fei’s guilt-ridden intensity.

     When the stubborn Long insists that he will not only remain in the city but find his own way to become a prostitute, Fei has no choice but to bring him into his own home, where his polite john quickly seduces him into sex. Fei takes him to a gay bar where in one of the most charming scenes of this now overtly serious film, the slightly clumsy, corny, but cute small town boy literally plays out his own form of seduction, coaxing Fei onto the dance floor where for one of the first times in the film we see the successful money boy let down his guard and momentarily truly enjoy his body without having to surrender to someone he doesn’t truly love.

 

      The relationship between the two follows, but at almost the same moment, Fei also comes upon the street singer in a café, realizing that it is in fact his former lover Xiaolai.

        The two re-establish their love, but things have radically changed since Xiaolai, no longer able to support himself as a prostitute, has married and has a child, his life like so many young gay men in this film, almost paralleling Fei’s earlier mockery of such relationships, have become a kind of sham, if nothing else a denial of their dominant sexuality and a settling for a life basically of deceit.

       Xiaolai’s wife, like Lulu, is entire aware of her husband’s past life, having accepted it as fully as Xiaolai has devoted himself seeming to her and his child. Xiaolai, perhaps feeling vestiges of their love, even as a cripple, insists he has come to terms with his life and his happy with it.

       Even though the relationship between Long and Fei has progressed through a moving and mysterious, almost mystical evening between the two in memory of Fei’s grandfather who has just died, Fei is not yet ready to give up on his deeper lover of the man who lost his own life to protect his lover. Trapped in the past, Fei meets secretly with Xiaolai’s wife, providing her with a washing machine and the child with other gifts. In his imagination he hopes, in fact, to bring the entire family into his and Long’s own life as what appears to be a sort of polyamorous relationship, unthinkable in Chinese culture, but something upon which he has become fixated.

        Hearing of his plans, the previously seeming innocent quickly becomes very smart, threatening to, and finally leaving his lover if he cannot come to terms with the past, to accept what has happened fully without further regrets and guilt just as Xiaolai apparently has.

        Long lays out the situation quite fully: “Don’t deceive yourself anymore. You’re always living for others. Do you think that makes you a great person? The way you sacrifice yourself, you constantly hurt yourself, and sometimes others too. Xiaolai has left the pain behind. I know that you love me. We can have a good life together. We can also live the life we want. Isn’t that good enough?”

        Fei: “You are family. He is my beloved. You can’t change that.”

        And finally, the comic figure takes off his mask: “Do you think you can really hurt me like that? …You devoured me. That’s not love.”

 

       Xiaolai has tried to warn Fei away, even telling him to never again visit their home again; but Fei continues, finally even stalking the slower moving prey in an earie late-night encounter, when

finally catching up to Xiaolai, who stands near to him and in what seems like many long minutes comes close to completing but finally refuses the kiss. Their relationship, it is apparent, is finished, a thing of the past.

 

       Now Fei has no one, no lovers, no family, despite all his sacrifices, all of his self-demeaning actions in which he himself never seemed to be truly there. Who is he? This beautiful young man come to be so successful for attracting others to him? In a long, slow frame Fei sits pondering just such questions.

        Fortunately, the lover rings not only twice, three times, four, but keeps buzzing toward the spider as Fei has described himself—just like at the bar, finally enticing Fei once more into the dance of life.

       I found this film beautiful and mesmerizing. In Taiwan, however, it was perceived quite differently. In the Taipei Times critic Han Cheung took the film to task for a great many serious problems and even grievances, particularly for C. B. Yi’s use of the obvious Taiwan landscape as a pretend China. “Given the tensions between Taipei and Beijing, it might raise a few eyebrows for Taiwanese to see their homeland portrayed as part of China.  Politics aside, however, CB Yi, the Chinese-Austrian director who is using a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against relatives still living in China, has made some other questionable decisions.”

       Most of his complaints involved the strange mix of languages, the use of traditional Mandarin spoken by some quite flawlessly, but by other figures in manner which in the US we might equate with something like Brooklynese. In the Southern China scenes, in particular, Cheung was appalled that while some of Fei’s family spoke properly in Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), while his father and Long speak with strong Beijing accents, obviously unable to speak the local tongue. I should imagine this would be akin to encountering a family speaking in the dialect of the US southern Mississippi, with two of the local figures entering into the conversation with a waspy Bostonian accent.

      One can be quite empathetic for his viewpoints, but it hints slightly at a self-censoring attitude that criticizes the director for locating a work with gay sexual content that would have not been allowed in another, by locating it supposedly in more open-minded country and, moreover, critiques Yi’s inability to find actors who might properly speak the proper Chinese dialects instead of employing local Taiwanese actors. Apparently Cheung because of the political situation, sees such subject matter verboten in a free country, and would have preferred that all of its actors had been born and raised in China, having learned proper Mandarin. He seems to be nodding more to Chinese attitudes than to those of his own country. Moreover, whatever happened to the “suspension of disbelief,” one might ask.

      To the outsider, of course, these are mute points, and the film as a whole, while certainly not perfect in his pacing or in its resolution of the dilemmas it presents, is a moving work of art, particularly for a first-time director.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).