A Queer Story

This brave film brings to centre stage a subject that no Hong-Kong film-maker has confronted so directly before. With all the charm, wit and intelligence that was so clearly in evidence in his involving and popular Hu-Du-Men (also shown at the fesival), Shu Kei's A Queer Story is a milestone in Hong-Kong cinema. It is the Longtime Companions and My Beautiful Launderette of Chinese film. Handsome, Hong Kong star of the moment Jordan Chan (usually seen in punk gangster roles - seeYoung and Dangerous III), is the young, gay hairdresser who has lived with an older man for some years. Played by George Lam (46), Law Kar Sing is at the heart of the movie. Very ironically Law is a marriage-guidance counsellor who cannot sort out his own relationships or feelings. His secret and long-term gay partnership is threatened by enormously conservative family pressure to marry - in particular from his father, once a Cantonese opera star - and by his own uncertainties about the relationhip. Deftly sketching the different aspects of their gay and straight life in the city with a rich array of different personalities, Shu Kei constructs an involving melodrama from the crisis and collapse of a once happy relationship which turns into a cold war. The older man, still in the closet, first has a relationship with a young, male prostitute and then under unbearable pressure proposes marriage to an old admirer. Simon Field