Chinese immigrant drama ‘Blue Sun Palace’ finds gentle emotional balance

Its 116 minutes are divided in two, with an initial half hour that plays like an idealistic romance, but is soon cut short by tragedy. It’s here that the title and opening credits make their delayed arrival, framing the movie’s drama (and its characters) as existing before and after a distinct event that defines their trajectories. All the while, Tsang presents her New York setting as a place by and for the city’s Chinese community, seldom widening her lens to include spaces that might be hostile to them, or might treat them as outsiders. They remain far away from their homelands, but Flushing is home as well—the kind of home they’ve made for themselves, with its familiar cuisines and store signage.

This is, of course, one of the charms of New York City: walk far enough and you’ll feel like you’ve passed through a dozen different nations. In keeping with this idea, Tsang doesn’t draw on the canonical history of New York cinema—the likes of Spike Lee, Woody Allen, or John Cassavetes—as much as she echoes Hong Kong and Taiwanese masters, like Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-Liang, in her use of space, focus, primary colors, loneliness, and romantic intimacy. She even casts the latter’s frequent collaborator, Lee Kang Sheng, in the lead role of Cheung, a middle-aged handyman who fled from China to the United States to escape his debts.

While we learn a great deal about Cheung’s home and work life through Tsang’s frank, straightforward portrayal, we first meet him as he shares a late-night meal with Didi (Haipeng Xu), a kind, ambitious single mother who works at a local massage parlor. Both actors deliver immensely radiant performances, which quickly draw us into Cheung and Didi’s blossoming romance, and which Tsang and cinematographer Norm Li film with an intoxicated sensibility. At first, the movie’s lengthy shots float from one character to the other, electrifying the space between them, but the camera soon begins to capture them at a distance, as they lounge casually in the afterglow of a night spent together. The camera observes them as a single shape, whose contours are gilded by gentle sunlight, outlining them together as though they’d briefly become one.

Gentle dialogue exchanges also illuminate Didi’s relationships with three of her coworkers, with whom she lives in on-site quarters. There’s a charm to the routines we’re allowed to witness—the four women find moments of fun wherever they can—and yet, the occasional sense of longing for home enters conversations without warning. Just as sudden are the moments their workplace becomes a space of uncomfortable possibility, with clients who either demand or expect a little extra, despite the clear “No Sexual Services” sign on the parlor’s door.

Didi is closest to Amy, a sisterly coworker with whom she hopes to open a restaurant in Baltimore someday. This seems within the realm of possibility—if still far off in the distance—but a random mugging gone wrong cuts their dreams tragically short. The suddenness of this event changes the fabric of the film at large; where Tsang’s camera once floated gently and freely, it begins to move in rigid, spectral fashion, practically taking on the properties of a ghost.

Blue Sun Palace may not be a supernatural film, but Didi’s presence looms large over the rest of its runtime. Her absence forces a quiet, desolate Cheung and a nervously distraught Amy into close proximity, resulting in an uncanny and at times uncomfortable friendship that mirrors the movie’s initial romance in strange and fascinating ways. The crater Didi’s absence makes of their lives is a complicated one to fill, and they’re both left to claw their way out in ways they can’t always put into words.

There’s a painterly quality to Tsang’s use of the urban environment, but her calming visual portrayal of Flushing soon finds itself in a tense tug of war, the more Amy’s emotions become rankling and unpredictable. Every space becomes liminal, including and especially the massage parlor, a place where labor, touch, and intimate connection become untangled in messy ways—for instance, when Cheung avails of Amy’s services, gradually crossing each wire through physical sensation.

Blue Sun Palace is a film in which the meanings behind places are constantly in flux, dragging the characters’ fragile sense of self into a state of perpetual transition. While its closing scenes are likely more obfuscating than Tsang intends, the story she tells still manages to feel dramatically whole. It’s one of people picking up shattered pieces of themselves, in a place that already demands they be cleaved in twain, their very existence spread across oceans and continents. But in telling this story within the narrow physical parameters of a home away from home, Tsang magnifies her drama through familiar cultural and geographical flourishes without apology, making it feel like a vital part of a larger American (and global) cinematic whole.