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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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