Film: End Of Love
Release date: 7th June 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Simon Chung
Starring: Chi-Kin Lee, Ben Yeung, Clifton Kwang, Guthrie Yip
Genre: Drama
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: China
Like his 2005 debut The Innocent, the second feature by young Hong Kong director Simon Chung offers up another tale of a gay man and his rite of passage.
Hong Kong, the present. Young Ming arrives at a rehabilitation centre in the hillsides of Hong Kong to serve a three-month term of incarceration for a first time minor drug infraction, presumably as an alternative to a prison sentence. The centre does not have guards or fences and the prisoners are well behaved, having appeared to have accepted the Christian beliefs that the centre is based on, and which Chi-an, the centre director teaches in daily prayer meetings.
Chi-an notices Ming's recalcitrant ways and assigns a slightly older man, Keung, who is a recovering heroin addict, to help him stay on the straight and narrow during his time at the centre. Ming responds positively to Keung's gentle guidance, and though Ming does not reveal much of what brought him to his conviction, we learn through flashback that Ming is gay, and that after taking up part-time male prostitution he also started experimenting with drugs, such as ketamine, ecstasy and poppers, supplied by his flatmate Cyrus, who also arranged his first payment-for-sex assignation.
Keung leaves the centre before Ming, and when Ming’s term at the centre is over, he takes up Keung's offer to stay with him in his city apartment while he finds himself a job.
On arrival, he meets Keung's girlfriend, Jackie, who, like Keung, works at a hair salon. Jackie at first dislikes Keung, but later on seduces him, despite his sexual preference for men, in a drunken moment when they are alone. Soon after she breaks up with Keung, which causes a relapse for Keung into heroin use. Out of a sense of guilt and friendship for Keung, Ming again seeks out Cyrus for prostitution assignments...
End Of Love is clearly a film with a social conscience that wants to say something about the ills of modern life and the sterility of sex without love – unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to know what that is, and doesn't offer the audience much consolation in terms of drama or style either.
Clearly this is a very low-budget film, but that's not much of an excuse - there have been some great low-budget films about relationships, from Cassavetes’ Shadows to Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, from Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love to Almodavar’s Matador... What those films had which End of Love lacks is style, a strong political or personal viewpoint, a sense of irony, and a passion for life.
The performances in this film, particularly the young hero, are insipid, except where they are occasionally histrionic, but the major problem seems to be the script itself. The result is an oddly polite film, which is happy to show its characters taking drugs or having sex parties (both done with so little excitement, you wonder why the characters bother), but is uncomfortable getting under the skin of its characters or examining the society they live in.
The soundtrack is monotonous cheap electric guitar ‘atmosphere’, the photography and editing more suited to daytime soap opera than the medium of film.
Worst of all, though, in all likelihood this was made with the best intentions for a predominantly gay audience, yet it only reinforces the stereotypical idea that homosexuality leads to loveless and financially-exploitative relationships, drug abuse, prostitution and, finally, prison or death - this presumably unintentional subtext is sustained by the film’s failure to question the doctrine of redemption through self-control and prayer, which the Christian-run rehabilitation centre lays on Ming in the first half of the film (in fact, the few joyful moments of the film occur during Ming’s incarceration there, including a trip to the beach)... If not for the gay sex scenes in the film – which are as miserable as everything else in it – one might think this film was financed by a Christian morality group.
This film is really is a good example of how liberal intentions to treat the subject of homosexuality naturalistically and ‘seriously’ most often result in bathos and earnest tedium, and conversely the importance of camp and irony in the creation of dramatic and dynamic ‘Queer Cinema’ - as the vivid filmmaking of Fassbinder, Jarman, Almodovar and others have proved. JC
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