There are two extremely jarring elements to Constance Tsang’s “Blue Sun Palace,” an otherwise soft and immaculately textured micro-portrait of three Chinese immigrants whose lives criss-cross at the Flushing massage parlor where two of them work. The first is the casting of Lee Kang-sheng, whose presence in Tsang’s fluorescent take on New York City — a world removed from the dilapidated Taipei he’s come to embody in the films of Tsai Ming-liang — instills every frame with an extratextual aura of dislocation. The second jolt comes from a shocking act of violence that triggers the title card some 33 minutes into the movie. It’s a cold reminder of the risks that come with starting over so far from home, and a new beginning for the warmly purgatorial story that follows; a story less compelled by the American Dream than it is by the void that forms in the wake of that empty promise.
Largely confined to spaces cloistered enough for her characters to forget where they are, and almost entirely told through the kind of unblinking long takes that her lead actor has lived in for so much of his career, Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one. “This restaurant is small,” Cheung (Lee) says to the smiling Didi (Xu Haipeng) in the date scene that opens the movie, “but the food is quite delicious.”
The camera swishes back and forth between the sturdy Taiwanese construction worker and the buoyant, Mainland-born masseuse sitting across from him, creating an internal velocity that seems to shrink the world down to the size of their table. Whether speaking Mandarin in a Chinese restaurant, singing Faye Wong ballads at a karaoke bar, or teasing each other after an intimate night in Didi’s bedroom above the massage parlor, being together allows these characters to forget what they left behind, and — for the time being — to ignore the heartache of finding something to replace it with.
Didi, at least, has a clear goal in mind, which might help to explain her cheerful nature — a disposition that makes her beloved among the other women at the massage parlor, as well as a favorite among their non-Chinese male clientele, who know that the “no sexual services” sign is more of an advertisement than a warning. She hopes to open a restaurant with her culinarily gifted co-worker Amy (Wu Ke-xi) in Baltimore one day, and tacks a cheap poster of the city on her wall in order to keep her spirits high; the film is only a few minutes old when Didi invites Cheung to take the poster home with him, but the gesture is already freighted with the kind of boundless generosity that can only be shared between two people who have nothing and everything to give each other.
Cheung can only reward her kindness by receiving it with the gratitude it deserves, but it would be hard for Didi to find someone else who could do that so well, as callous Facetime calls with his money-obsessed wife and disinterested teenage daughter have made it all too easy for Cheung to appreciate being appreciated. Which isn’t to suggest that we’re asked to pity him. Where another filmmaker might have framed Cheung’s emigration as a selfless act, Tsang — whose probing direction creates a rich and detailed reality from the day-to-day business of life at the parlor — recognizes that righteousness is a luxury that desperation can’t afford. All her characters are trying to make the best of a bad situation, and the slow-core romance of “Blue Sun Palace” blossoms into something much thornier and more irreconcilable at the end of its first act, when a sudden tragedy reminds those characters of the world’s indifference regarding their efforts.
The event reconfigures the film’s geography in a way that angles Cheung toward Amy at a similar degree as he once pointed himself at Didi, but Amy — whose already broken dreams have splintered into even smaller pieces — is less inclined to offer herself as a lifeline. She yearns for change in a way that seems to alter the shape of the movie itself (once unfolding almost in real-time, “Blue Sun Palace” grows elliptical in a way that makes it hard for us to find our bearings again), and Wu’s raw but inviting performance makes quiet spectacle of searching for a change that Amy can believe in. Watching Amy try to repair a leak in the hole of the parlor roof for minutes on end might seem to belabor an obvious metaphor (especially once she phones Cheung for help), but it speaks volumes to see this character try to affect that change herself, and Tsang’s patience with Amy only sharpens the effect of Amy’s impatience with Cheung.
The emotions in this movie are too active and heartfelt for it to feel like an endurance test, and while it’s true that “Blue Sun Palace” is paced at the speed of slow-thawing despair, the film’s durational emphasis is less pronounced than its Tsai Ming-liang connection might imply. Tsang only grapples with time in order to trace how difficult it is for her characters — all victimized and vulnerable to one extent or another — to escape the anxieties that have followed them to America, where they’ve taken root in the soil of their own hopes and fears.
The second half of this film can be drifting and unformed in a way that pushes us further away from Cheung, Amy, and Didi right when we’re begging to know them better. But showing a massage in real-time allows Tsang to pack a universe of pain and uncertainty into the span of an ill-fated rubdown, just as the decision to linger on Cheung’s dates with Amy — and their uncanny resemblance to his dates with Didi — emboldens “Blue Sun Palace” to more fully illustrate the hardships of starting over in a place that limits who you’re allowed to be. (And it goes without saying that Lee’s terse performance is a marvel of unspoken feeling.) “Do you know who you are here?” Amy asks Cheung. By the end of this resolutely humane but fiercely unsentimental film, it’s moving enough to see Cheung recognize that he doesn’t, even as we mourn all the people he wasn’t able to be along the way.
Grade: B+
Dekanalog will release “Blue Sun Palace” in theaters on Friday, April 25.
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