Who is the unnamed protagonist at the heart of Jun Li’s “QueerPanorama?” Played by Jayden Cheung, when we initially meet him in a grimy, derelict apartment straight out of Tsai Ming-Liang’s “The Hole,” he’s merely a boyish reference, a Hong Kong-ese twink peeing into his sink. As the film proceeds, the young man’s identity, or lack thereof, becomes “QueerPanorama’s” primary subject as he hops from hookup to hookup, adopting traits of his sexual partners along the way.
While “QueerPanorama” may sound like an iteration of “Holy Motors,” which portrayed contemporary digital life as a series of spectacular reinventions, its tone is much closer to the modernist ennui of “The Passenger.” The disparity between these two possible directions is remarked upon early in the film, when Cheung discusses procreation with his first partner. When Cheung asks about new technology that enables the creation of a baby with the DNA of more than two people, the other man remarks that the world is too fucked up to have kids. Following the latter dejected worldview, our protagonist’s life is defined by the dreams and occupations of his partners. He’s less a composite of these other individuals than a blank slate to be dressed up by other people’s affectations. His story changes from hookup to hookup, but the tonality of the character and the film is an affectless, low-frequency sigh. With each partner, Cheung engages in conversation, often in stilted non-native English that recalls Hong or Dan Sallitt. The compositions are fussy and manicured, smothered with a flat monochrome filter, and when Cheung has sex with his partners, a wide range of explicit acts are always ritualistically with recursive frames.
It’s clear from the jump that Cheung’s character is deeply depressed, and while the visual approach is enervatingly formulaic, the most interesting aspects of “QueerPanorama” relate to its freeform narrative content, and how it interrogates the sources of Cheung’s distress. An existential thread is woven from Cheung’s first encounter. Discussing each other’s background, Cheung claims to be an actor because he enjoys observing and pretending to be other people, while the other man, a DJ by night and a scientist by day, says he likes his profession because it makes him feel small. While it’s eventually revealed that Cheung’s story is a fabrication, the idea of pretending quickly makes its way into the bedroom, and intersects with colonial power dynamics. When Cheung next hooks up with a British man, Phil, and the pair engage in role play, the man’s preference for Asian men becomes an unavoidable topic of conversation. Cheung later meets the Brit’s ex-boyfriend, and the Taiwanese man asks Cheung to rape him as Phil.
These pointed political references connect acting to the escapist pleasure, and question how much of the characters’ fantasies are formed by overarching political narratives. Cheung’s ambiguous aspirations outside of his sex life all look Westward, as he consistently refers to a boyfriend in New York and the West’s relative artistic vibrancy. To a certain extent, Cheung’s amorphous personality is attributed to Hong Kong’s position between its colonial past and its fraught contemporaneous relationship with Mainland China. Even the stilted nature of “QueerPanorama’s” narrative is determined by Hong Kong’s international position, as Cheung’s partners, most of whom are expatriates, force him to speak in non-native English, and it’s perpetually unclear whether he’s more comfortable speaking Mandarin or Cantonese.
Despite the references to real-world tensions, “QueerPanorama” exists in a punishingly claustrophobic headspace. This is most obvious in the barren abstraction of Cheung’s apartment, where Cheung’s arrested development is on full display. There, he sings karaoke into a dildo and rides his bike nude through the empty hallways. Bridging the gap between this more subconscious interior landscape and the mannered sexual encounters, Li pointedly uses dissolves to suggest a more porous universe. As the linearity of Cheung’s hookups begins to crumble, each new sequence becomes a composite of every other. The foregrounded subjectivities make more surreal flourishes feel like a coping mechanism. How to square two moments of implied sexual violence, one of which leads to a homage of Apichatpong’s “Tropical Malady?” Is this Cheung, who remarks that his ideal life would involve going to the movies and having lots of sex, turning to cinematic reference as a new form of escapist role-play? And what to make of the unnamed app that Cheung uses to schedule all of his hookups? While it’s easy to assume that he might be using Grindr, the handwavy nature of “QueerPanorama’s” most powerful structuring force suggests that Cheung’s world is constantly warped by interlocking personal, national, and corporate narratives. While Li successfully conveys the sweeping gloom of this liminal existence, he stops short of making it consistently compelling.
“Queerpanorama” Trailer
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