Szu-Wei Chen | 小傑 (Jay) / 2019

the difference

by Douglas Messerli

 

Szu-Wei Chen (screenwriter and director) 小傑 (Jay) / 2019 [14 minutes]

 

Jay, a 13-year-old, is in awe of his elder, athletically-inclined, handsome brother. It’s not the first time in cinema history that the younger brother quickly turns that fascination in a short of sexual obsession.

     It begins for Jay (Nick Wang) by simply watching his brother (Aric Chen) play basketball, but soon includes being fascinated by his bedroom workouts, the smell of his body, and that leftover taste of his sweat upon his underwear and bedsheets. Jay even asks to play basketball with the brother just to feel his hands upon him as his sibling positions him into better moves and challenges him on the court. But when other boys join in the game, it quickly becomes apparent that Jay is unwanted, and he bows out.

     But even then, his brother, later checking a spot on his arm where he has fallen on the court, provides pleasures unknown to the young teenager. But when his brother brings home a girl (Rae Liu) and begins to make love to her, the intrusion—particularly the sound of their love making—is too much to bear, and he goes to the front door to ring the bell as if that might bring about a cessation to what can only remind him, once again, that he is not the true focus of his heterosexual brother’s life. The bell doesn’t stop them in the midst of their coitus. The fantasy is over for Jay.

     He is left only with a further removed fantasy as he picks up his brother’s undershorts, puts them to his nose, and jacks off—an act even a 13-year-old recognizes as perverse.

      As they dine on carry-in food, even the brother knows that he has created a new distance between them, as Jay sits at the table, hunched over his dinner, without truly eating. The brother goes over the bedroom and asks the girl to join them as he zips his open shirt closed, sensing perhaps that Jay’s sullenness has something to do with his own nakedness.

     In the very last scene, we see Jay again watching his brother and others playing basketball, apart and separated by them now even more by his inner feelings. A girl his age (Yi-Shan Wang), just as she has in the first scene, comes to sit next to him. But whereas in the first scene he quite obviously ignores her, here he acknowledges her presence, turns to her and, after considering it for a moment, leans forward and gives her a quick kiss.

      For a moment we might almost fear that Taiwan-born director Chen might be selling out to normative expectations, Jay turning to heterosexuality in recognition of the absurdness of his brotherly love. But immediately after, Chen shows Jay washing his face, even his mouth, from all traces of the girl’s momentary encounter with his own lips. He looks up into the water-spotted mirror, peering at a face that he recognizes will be defined by its sexual difference.

     This carefully directed and subtle film was the director’s first work; since then, Chen has made two further films not focused on LGBTQ subject matter.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).