A really well-written and objective review of Speechless:
Last night saw the international premiere of Simon Chung’s third feature, Speechless, at
the BFI 26th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It’s notable for a
Chinese film with a gay theme that it was filmed (and is set on) the
mainland, straying beyond the usually safe boundaries of Hong Kong
Island. It’s a film of two halves, beginning as a slow-burning
mystery-cum-romance before turning into a love-triangle thriller, but it
doesn’t really manage to pull off making those parts into a cohesive
whole.
A naked Westerner walks into a river and
is washed up on the banks of a nearby town. The police take him in but
he refuses to speak, or is incapable of speech. Eventually they transfer
him to the local hospital where he is befriended by Jiang, a handsome
young nursing assistant, who brings him home-made steamed buns, and a
tentative friendship develops.
Before the silent foreigner can be
transported to a mental institution Jiang helps him escape and takes him
into the countryside where they visit the places Jiang spent his
childhood. They begin to unlock things in each other, and this leads
them back into how Luke, as we discover the foreigner is called, came to
the decision to drown himself.
A French exchange student, Luke started
an affair with Han who, along with his girlfriend Yun, is a member of a
local Chinese Christian church. When Yun discovers what Luke and Han are
up to she takes it upon herself to expose Han publicly and humiliates
him to the point of suicide. The director cleverly tells this back-story
from Yun’s point of view first before revealing the whole picture.
Unfortunately this requires an overlong flashback that disrupts the
narrative drive, already dislocated by the change of pace and tone once
the more melodramatic thriller elements are brought in. The plot becomes
somewhat overwrought and the young actors are just not strong enough to
carry it.
The ending of the film is deliberately
ambiguous and raises more questions than it answers about both the
characters’ relationships and the relationship between China and the
West. Luke’s attitude to his relationship with Han is different because
he’s more relaxed about being gay and it’s as if the fact of Luke’s
nationality is a deliberate strategy to contrast those attitudes, but
also to examine what can happen when cultures with varying degrees of
acceptance try to come together.
The film suffers along with its characters insomuch as the difficulties of communication are not just verbal ones.
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