Liu Bingjian | 男男女女 (Nánnán nǚnǚ) (Men and Women) / 1999

comings and goings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Liu Bingjian and Cui Zi’en (screenplay) Liu Bingjian (director) 男男女女 (Nánnán nǚnǚ) (Men and Women) / 1999

 

With the earlier Chinese film Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace (1996), Liu Bingjian’s 1999 film Men and Women stands as one of the first major Chinese movies to explicitly depict homosexual activity. But unlike Zhang’s work, basically an underground tale, Liu’s film represents the working-class’ quotidian experiences. Indeed, the film’s central actions consist of the most banal of everyday activities, the camera focusing for long periods of time on the film’s central characters going about daily chores: Qing Jie’s (Yang Qing) attempts to convince a couple of her customers to purchase a sweater; the young boy she hires as her assistant Xiao Bo and her unpacking and displaying new garments they have just received; Qing chopping up vegetables for their dinner; Xiao and his friends Chong Chong and Gui Gui stuffing fliers promoting Chong and Gui’s new magazine on toilet literature; Qing’s husband Kang simply reading the newspaper; and frame after frame of cars, trucks and pedestrians swarming the Beijing streets.

      Since the film was shot in a few days with little budget, these scenes are often ill-lit, noisy, and quite frankly boring to sit through, but in the end they establish the very banality and normalcy of the lives of these figures who only in a few sudden bursts of communication and action reveal the other realities brewing within.

     The plot is equally banal. One morning Xiao Bo, a shy boy originally from the country, shows up at Qing Jie’s small clothing shop having been given the name of a man who might be willing to employ him. The shopkeeper quickly assures him that there is no one there by that name, but Xiao persists, standing patiently in the shop while customers bicker over the prices of coats and blouses.

      When the haggling customers finally leave, Qing again assures the boy that his has the wrong address, but eventually ends up hiring him herself. She is obviously so taken with the young man that she even offers him a bed in her small apartment, over her husband Kang’s mild objections. Clearly she is also taken with his good looks, a possible romantic partner if not for herself perhaps for her friend A Meng. Perhaps she sees him as a surrogate son, as she fixes up his room while he showers, and prepares a full meal during which she continually attends to his preferences and encourages him to fully eat. 

     When later we see her and Kang in bed that evening, she refuses her husband sex, so that we are led to presume that their long silences cover up the years of contentions between them.

      Xiao Bo proves to be an apt assistant with a real flair for the displays and a patience dealing with the contentious customers that she innately lacks. She spends more and more time with her friend A Meng, introducing her to Xiao Bo. Even Kang seems to finally approve of the boy, taking him along on a visit to one of his wife’s clients who refuses to pay, brutally beating the man until he gives up the money; at another time he spends one long evening before dinner playing pool with the shop boy, Xiao easily winning all of their games.

     But Xiao’s “date” with A Meng does not go well, and she later tells Qing that she thinks Xiao does like women, something the viewer might now suspect given the fact that he tells A Meng that he has no interest in any of the contemporary female movie stars, and refuses even to take her to the movies. Obviously he is no cinema connoisseur. 

     At first, Qing refuses to believe that it’s possible, a nice-looking boy like Xiao not being interested in girls, but watching him more closely, particularly as he blithely works on clothing a naked manikin, she realizes the possible truth of her friend’s observation. As she discusses the situation with A Meng, she does not show any moral outrage or social disapproval, but merely worries that it will be very difficult for him in their society. There is no talk of his liking boys or men instead of women, and no concept, it appears, of homosexuality. She is simply worried about his well-being.

     In the subplot, meanwhile, we encounter a handsome young man, Chong Chong, who regularly visits the Beijing public toilets, gathering the words and graffiti symbols plastered on their walls for material in his new magazine devoted to “toilet literature and behavior,” a subject that has perhaps grown out of his friend’s internet broadcasts. Since the Beijing toilets are the major meeting place for Chinese gay men, there is no need for the film to establish his probable homosexuality, particularly when we soon discover that he and his co-partner in this strange publication—perhaps stranger for the Westerner than for the Chinese, who would possibly recognize the magazine as a cover for a gayzine—Gui Gui, a rather effeminate boy who we have spotted earlier in a brief and meaningless street encounter with Xiao Bo, when even after Xiao has passed him, he continues to make obvious his appreciation of the boy’s appearance through his several looks back and hand gestures. The hero of director Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum klo (1980) would certainly approve of their enterprise.

      Two other incidents in the central story, one minor and the other momentous, help to build up the tension in Lui’s otherwise rather placid presentment of his tale. After Xiao and Kang’s pool game Kang briefly stops by a public restroom to urinate, Xiao quickly joining him, the two momentarily standing side by side at the urinal as they talk about the high and low methodologies of playing pool. The fact that cinematographer Liu Jiang immediately cuts to a scene of a larger public bathroom into which Chong Chong enters and exits establishes an unspoken link between the two locations and those who frequent them. 

       A short while later, Kang is home in his apartment as Xiao showers, a scene reminiscent of the early instance in which Qing showed her new house guest the shower, the camera voyeuristically enjoying his handsome physique for several long moments. Kang plays the role of the camera in this case. And when Xiao finishes showering and begins a series of 50 some push-ups, Kang stands close by calling out the numbers. Suddenly Qing’s husband, having been denied sex by his wife for some time, grabs the boy and attempts to rape him. When the boy pulls free and begins packing his clothes with the intention of leaving, he further verbally abuses him, mocking his manhood.

       As he storms through the streets, Xiao is rightfully furious with the situation, stopping by the store simply to tell Qing that he made the decision to quit. She, evidently believing that he intends to take a train home, trying to hand him extra money and make sure that he buys his tickets at the official ticket stand and not from peddlers.

        But Xiao has no such intentions, soon after calling up an old friend with whom he has obviously stayed during a previous crisis, Chong Chong. The two threads of the story have now become interwoven, and the sexual subtext slowly begins to show its weave, particularly since Gui Gui is now living in the same small apartment where Chong Chong has readily agreed to house Xaio on a cot. It quickly becomes apparent to the rather slow-thinking boy that his friend Cong and Gai are sharing a bed.

       Soon, Xaio is working for the couple, attempting to sell subscriptions to trendy shop owners who might also place them in their establishments. And it is here where we watch the three putting

all their energy into stuffing fliers and attempt to get their controversial magazine some attention.

       We now observe Qing in the shower, moisturizing her face as she yells out to Kang that she has something to tell him.

        In the night, Chong arises from the bed he shares with Gui, appearing at the side of Xaio’s cot seeming just to tuck him in, but almost spontaneously bending low to give him a gentle kiss on the cheek. The boy awakens without at all appearing to be troubled by the event.

        Another day the trio, Chong, Gui, and Xaio observe three other young men their age playing basketball and offer themselves up as an opposing team. They lose quickly without scoring.

       Qing finally washes away her moisturizer and enters the kitchen where she tells Kang that is leaving him, the apartment is all his. When he asks if she wants a divorce, she suggests it’s up to him. She admits to having an affair, but will not tell him who it is with; but when he finally insists that he will not let her leave without her telling, she admits that it is her friend A Meng, whom she immediately calls to say she is ready. A Meng with a small cab soon arrives, and two get to make their escape. But this, after all, is a comedy, and the car engine now won’t turn over. The two must get out a push it until it once again starts, and they return to drive off into their future.       

     Late at night, Chong again arises, attempting not to awaken Gui. He returns, this time completely naked, to the side of Xaio’s cot, in this instance pulling up blanket and joining him. Clearly Xaio is now ready for the encounter since the two explore one another’s bodies with evident pleasure under the covers.

      The next morning, we see Gui, also packed up and ready to go. A telephone message serves as his final “tragic,” he melodramatically proclaims, broadcast of his “toilet literature” series, which includes a latrine story and a pun-laden anal riddle. Xaio and Chong sit on the cot to listen and when it’s over crawl back under their covers.

       Even “coming out” in this sweet tale of everyday life, becomes just another aspect of the ordinary.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 4, 2022).