Yen-Chu Chen | 癡癡的愛 (Craving) / 2021

the gift

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yen-Chu Chen (screenwriter and director) 癡癡的愛 (Craving) / 2021 [16 minutes]        

 

This remarkable Taiwanese short film by Yen-Chu Chen reads almost like a Kafka fable. A young man, Wei Jie (Ting-Jhen Hsu) is tending his fish in a small bowl, when a police officer (Hao-Zhe Lai) shows up.

    There has been a complaint—Wei Jie later imagines that it is from the old woman who lives below him—about noise. There is no evidence of any partying or that the rather admittedly smart-alecky resident has been making any noise whatsoever.

     Nonetheless, the police officer demands his identification, which the young man provides, joking that it is false; but admitting it is just a joke when he perceives that the young policeman seems to believe him. The policeman, accordingly, demands to see the full apartment which consists of just a small living room space and a bedroom, the very sight of the latter somewhat disturbing the policeman.

     He cannot observe, however, any real problems and prepares to leave. He puts his shoes back on and gets as far as the elevator before turning back, again knocking at the young man’s door and greeting the surprised tenant with a passionate kiss, which, after a pause, Wie Jie enthusiastically returns.

     Putting handcuffs on the lone apartment-dweller, the handsome policeman begins to fuck him, the two engaging in what appears to be quite fulfilling sex.

    Finally, the policeman has to leave, but begs to see his new lover the next evening. However, the young man declares he has other business that night and asks for a “rain check.” He raises his hands so that the policeman might release him from his handcuffs, which the officer does, while also stealing the young man ‘s keys which hang from a nearby hook.

    The next evening, the policeman arrives, opening the door, and wandering briefly through the young man’s living room, leaving him a small gift-wrapped box on a table.

     At that very moment, however, he hears a noise in the bedroom, and cautiously opens the door to discover his new-found lover having sex with another man (Young-Cing Liao).

     An overpowering rage suddenly overcomes him as he rushes in, after retrieving his gift, and brutally beats the stranger to death, pounding him over and over with the little box, while the young man, still in bed, pleads for mercy and forgiveness.

     Suddenly the policeman’s rage is over, and the realization of what he has just done washes over him in gestures of regret. He hands over the gift to the young man who quite hesitantly opens the box.

    Inside is a pair of handcuffs. Slowly, he hesitantly and somewhat apologetically offers up his arm, to which the policeman attaches one end of the cuff, while connecting the other to his own wrist. Together the two engage once more in passionate sex, the dead body lying on the floor near the bed.

    Throughout this film, it appears that the cop is a rookie—at least when it comes to gay sex, having been suddenly overwhelmed by a kind of love at first sight that drives him to want to possess the object of his desire. It seems that in doing his duty as a guardian of city, he has bottled up a craving so intense that when it is released, he simply does not no how to control it.

    But the power of this short work is that it offers up no attempts of explanations, resolves, or possible solutions. It is simply what it represents, a snapshot of a powerful desire that ends in revenge, murder, and a reiteration of the sexual release, which might be described as hinting at something close to a gay version of the desire portrayed so vividly in the Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima’s unforgettable In the Realm of the Senses (1976).

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).