Nigel Soh and Yvonne Lee | Good Seeing You / 2019

straight out abuse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nigel Soh (screenplay), Nigel Soh and Yvonne Lee (directors) Good Seeing You / 2019 [25 minutes]

 

Nigel Soh and Yvonne Lee’s Good Seeing You is an Asian movie with some very good cinematic moments about a subject, however, that I’ve simply grown tired of, the meeting up and growing love between two young boys that ends in only sorrow for one of them as the other cannot permit himself to admit that he is homosexual or even willing to explore the relationship that he has almost single-handedly set afire.

      I guess I’ve just grown rather disgusted by charming straight boys attempting to explore and overcome their own sexual desires. Jason (Nigel Soh) is the perfect victim, a truly innocent kid who doesn’t even smoke or drink, who at a party which he probably should never have attended and at which he certainly doesn’t feel comfortable, is spotted by an engaging extrovert Daniel (Jai Kishan) who quite literally brings Jason out of his shell, puts some booze in him, teaches him out to smoke a cig, and takes him home, within a brief time turning him almost into a slave.

     So in love is Jason with this charismatic man that he is willing to do his laundry, provide him with the answers for nearly all of his school tests, and even snuggle up in bed with him most nights. It’s the perfect relationship for Daniel, even if Jason is just a tool in his own self-exploration.

     For the moment that Jason finally demands a return of love, a simple kiss, the self-assured narcissist Daniel is absolutely horrified, so offended by the moisture of any male saliva implanted upon his own lip, in a wild wiping away of the event that almost outdoes Stephen Rea’s vomiting scene in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game of 1992 after he discovers that the woman to whom he has made love actually has a small cock.

     Daniel rushes off in homophobic horror, leaving the gentle Jason in the lurch.

    Months, perhaps years later, Jason runs into Daniel in a grocery store with a forceful woman at his side (Iffah Rakinah) who in their small chatter Jason discovers is about to marry his old flame.

Off goes Jason into the dark, walking away without the man who helped to make him who is now is. 

   I certainly do not demand that all, or even most, LGBTQ films have a happy ending. But gay nostalgia for an abusive would-be lover without any major significance no longer amuses me anymore. Instead of slouching off to years of heartfelt memories, if Jason had just kicked Daniel in the balls in front of his fiancée, leaving her to wonder what the hell is going on might at least have made me giggle. But tears for a crass hetero trying out his powers of seduction are beyond me.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).