Lan Yu DVD

LAN YU is a beautifully filmed, impressionistic look at a human dilemma: not recognizing what you really want until it's too late. Director Stanley Kwan has made an intelligent film that conveys genuine emotion without theatricality. There is much that rings true in this story for gay men, or anyone, of any age. Based on an incredibly popular 'E-novel' from an anonymous author, Jimmy Ngai's screenplay strikes many true chords and, along with a well-realized mise-en-scene, creates a completely believeable world.Casting seems ideal. Thirty-something Hangdong is played with great range by Jun Hu, and he looks convincing in the part as well. Playing Lan Yu, who ages from late teens into twenties, is remarkable Ye Liu. The men meet as part of a transaction: money for sex, paid by wealthy Hangdong. The sex scenes are presented with honesty, sensuality and without ambiguity. Yet, early on, it becomes clear to both that more is going on than physicality. For a short time, they pursue a relationship. Then everything is altered by choices made by one of the men. The main part of the film, told as a memory, is the playing out of the consequences of his choice. If these characters were heterosexual, the film's plot might be dismissed as hackneyed. But with the added dynamic of male/male relations in a homophobic world and with Kwan's dream-like, often poetic directing style, we have something ultimately original and worth experiencing.The film is presented letterboxed on the DVD and it looks very good. The often rich textures of the image come across beautifully. Also on the disc: a video interview with the director and four trailers for other gay-interest films.LAN YU has real emotional impact and sensuality. It deserves a wide audience.

Have to say the best thing about this movie was the acting, hands down. The movie (and I guess the novel it was based on?) knows its focus, so we get a tender story about love and timing. The story's not perfect- there's a want of more characterization for supporting roles, more insight into Lan Yu's family situation, Chen's friends' lives and more info on the big time-gaps that are left, but big as those faults sound on paper you still don't really care. The story knows what it's about, and the actors give great convincing performances. definitely a tear jerker. as an American viewer i guess I also found interesting how the film used life in the States and possibility there as a plot device, so that we get the American dream and its forms showing up in Beijing during a time of economic transformation to inform the plot from a few different angles. anyway i'm glad i watched it.

This is one of my favorite more real life gay movies ever. This movie always resonates a great deal with me on many levels and I find I really enjoy it. It's a much more real account of a gay man's life, the adversity he faces and creates, all the while failing to realize that he has inadvertently found his man and taking him years and many failures to realize that he already found the love of his life and should have been loving him instead of worrying about appeasing society. He takes years to realize that it isn't money, power, sex, or any of that that makes you happy its finding someone to love, who loves you back that defines and ends up saving his life.The only element of this movie that I don't like is the ending, which I never watch as I kind of, feel like it was just tacked on there in the standard Asian theme of gay guys dying alone and heart broken or something. Other than the ending, I think it's a great movie.

I really enjoyed this movie. The cover sparked my interest immediately, and the film did not disappoint. I was all smiles from the start (until the very end, naturally). How anyone can look upon the love shared between these two men in disgust (or homosexuals in general for that matter) is beyond me. It's sexy and real and beautiful and sad all in one. And like the director says in the interview available on the disc, it's a story no different than one that can be told between a man and a woman as well. Love is love. Anyway, it's also interesting to learn that the director can relate to both lead characters himself from his own personal experiences with love. And can't we all?

This is a significant Chinese film in so many ways: To begin with, it's one of a few major gay-themed productions with big stars in it. Second, even though it's considered a Taiwanese production, it's filmed in Beijing with actors from more conservative Mainland China; they certainly took some risks to be in a gay-themed film with not only some homoerotic scenes, but also a story that acknowledges the 1989 Tiananmen Protest.Nevertheless, why did I only give this product a 3-star rating? It's simply because of the quality of this DVD. The first time I saw this film, I was in China, and because the film was censored there, I had to see the full cut on a pirate DVD. Pirate DVDs in China can look really legit. They don't just get a random copy of an official release and rip it; they gather the best sources of a film's global releases and put the best picture, sound, subtitles together. This official US release, however, has a lot of problems with the picture.1) The film is presented in letterbox format, which means on a current widescreen TV, you will see black bars all around the film frame.2)They used a very rough source for this DVD. Some scene transitions looked really stiff, and a mysterious white stripe would appear on the left side of the film frame towards the end of the film!3)The sound was OK, but shockingly it wasn't quite in sync with the picture at the beginning of the film. The same problem happened to the English subtitles. (I guess you'd only find that out if you speak Mandarin.)Therefore, buy this product with caution if you really don't have an all-region player, but if you do, get the Region 2 French release. (It's the main source of the pirate DVD I saw in China.)

Avendo già letto il libro, l'ho trovato meno emozionante. Un gran casino tra il parlato cinese e i confusi sottotitoli francesi. Il libro è più interessante.

Ce film commence et se poursuit presque banalement : une relation de prostitution débouchant sur un amour réciproque entre Lan Yu et Chen Handong. Et très longtemps on peut penser que le film va avoir une fin heureuse... Puis survient, inattendu, le dénouement dramatique. Cela amène à la réflexion et en revoyant le film on se rend compte alors que derrière l'amour chacun met des choses différentes. Lan Yu est un sentimental qui se donne entièrement, Chen Handong est plus charnel et distant par rapport à sa relation. A ce propos, le commentaire de l'auteur, Stanley Kwan, enregistré sur ce DVD, est très utile. Un film qui aurait pu être banal et qui est un très bon film. Et cette réflexion sur les sentiments amoureux ne s'adresse pas qu'aux homosexuels...

Lan Yu is a remarkably frank and touching story of two gay men in Beijing, one an architecture student who seems at the beginning to be offering himself as a rent boy to subsidise his studies, his background being poor and rural. The other, Handong, is a successful businessman - who had been a poor student - born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He is the one who has far more trouble accepting his identity, even though he has no qualms about playing around just for the fun of it. Lan Yu brings out something different in him, but social pressure means that he ends up causing a lot of suffering for them both, however all is not bleak ... The film is set around the time of the Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989, but was made in 2001; it shows the events at one remove but the reference is clearly there, as is its aftermath which leads to Handong's imprisonment in the crackdown on international business ventures that followed. The personal story is interwoven with this, and its fallout for a group of characters - colleagues of Handong and family members - while never losing the feeling if intimacy around the main couple. Some of the scenes are very moving , and its honesty is quite amazing really. Both actors - Liu Ye and Hu Jun - convey great subtlety in their acting, and bravery, I would say ... Stanley Kwan films it with remarkable aesthetic focus, often using mirrors in the smaller spaces, suggesting how the characters are boxed in by convention on all sides, but opening out within these spaces in a way that has a real visual lustre, a bit like Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love. It is a great pity it has never had a British release, but the Strand Releasing version plays on my computer with no problem, as do all their DVDs, even though they are Region 1.