End of love

One of Hong Kong's better gay movies, screened at the city's annual film festival in 2009 with a III Rating, was shown at the Berlin festival but didn't gain a public release in its home city. End of Love seemed to deserve it, judging by the positive review in the Hollywood Reporter. There's none of the usual Asian angst about being gay, its review noted happily.

Its writer-director, Simon Chung, has delivered several technically competent gay movies since his first (1997) short. Stanley Beloved was a neatly crafted 20-minute study of a self-repressed teenage Hong Kong student trying to cope with gay feelings for a Caucasian schoolmate. A year later, First Love and Other Pains looked at a relationship between a forward gay Chinese student and his Caucasian teacher. In 2005, Innocent told tales about a young Chinese gay being out in Canada. Clearly not caring if he's typecast himself as a one-track film-maker, Chung now focuses on a young gay Hong Kong drug-addicted prostitute trying to get himself and his love life better organised.

When he's arrested on a drugs charge and sent to a Christian-run rehab centre, Ming (Chi-Kin Lee) meets and falls in brotherly love with a straight former addict, Keung (Gutherie Yip). Back on the outside, given a room by Keung in the flat he shares with a wayward girlfriend, problems arise as they have to do in such scenarios.

If this had been a tear-jerking Hong Kong gay fantasy from Scud, the two men from rehab would have shared a bed. Instead, more realistically, Ming never gets that close to Keung; instead, he's seduced by Keung's girlfriend. Throughout the movie, Ming is experiencing an on-off sexual and emotional relationship with a shopkeeper's son, Yan (Ben Yeung effectively conveying the man's conflicted character as closeted gay, interfering lover and caring son). That affair provides the gay genre's customary scenes of bedroom action, swimming on empty Hong Kong beaches, and wistful gazing.

Chung and his team seemed to have conducted valid field research into drug ingestion, male prostitution and Hong Kong's party-goers' behaviour. The detox camp's Christian leader and older inmates are especially well cast, and the Hong Kong location work is never incredible. But, as the dvd's set of stagy interviews reveal, everybody concerned knew they'd produced a sad story.

What happens next to Ming? Apparently, the movie-maker won't be telling us soon. In his dvd interview, he says his next project concentrates on a Westerner lost in a Chinese town. It's a safe bet that the lost man will be gay.