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Inside the Chinese Closet
- Director: Sophia Luvarà
CGiii Comment
This is a film about lies, deception, criminality and cowardice.
China - a country where Human Rights don't seem to matter much...but, tradition is everything...and, babies.
Regardless of your sexuality...it's an unwavering and non-negotiable get-married-and have-a-child dictum...do it to please your parents.
So, why be sensitive to tradition? Why preserve it?
Divisive questions indeed...as polarising as the occident and orient. Alas, neither asked nor answered.
For the sake of keeping up appearances and promulgating this obnoxious tradition - there are fake-marriage-markets...a bizarre business-like transaction, where lesbians and gay men barter over a wholly ridiculous union.
The discussion about buying babies is - truly - horrifying...the healthy ones are more expensive! Boys are more valuable than girls...this is a repugnancy...
Buying babies as if they were a mere commodities, for the sake of pleasing your parents' public persona is reprehensible and - both morally and legally - wrong.
But, what do they care...they are lying to themselves and everyone else. It's about time that these 'kids' stood up to their parents...without defiance there can be no change.
And, my god, do they need change.
As a film, it is deeply flawed...there are too many lingering, vacuous scenes. The karaoke singing was without purpose (and painful to the ears). There are no difficult questions asked, there are no enlightened answers given...but, what there is too much of is...eating.
And, it needs to be said...there's something distinctly fraudulent going on here. Andy and Cherry are in-the-closet...but, they are making a film about hiding their sexualities...HELLO - it's a film, the trailer is all over the internet!
It's a film that will turn stomachs and change minds...uncomfortable, flawed filmmaking...yet, powerful and [totally] divisive.
Trailer...
Inside the Chinese Closet TRAILER from Sophia Luvara' on Vimeo.
The(ir) Blurb...
Andy’s father knows that his son is gay but, determined to conform to social conventions, he urges him to find a lesbian who is willing to marry him. Cherry has already entered into a bogus marriage, but now her parents expect their only daughter to provide them with a grandchild so that they can finally put an end to their neighbours’ gossiping. In China, gay men and lesbians are under enormous pressure to spare their parents the perceived shame of having an unmarried child without offspring. Homosexuality may no longer be illegal, but understanding for a life lived outside traditional heterosexual norms is rare.
Director Sophie Luvarà sensitively accompanies Andy and Cherry in their often absurd attempts to do the right thing: bogus gay-lesbian marriage markets, agencies for surrogate mothers, price lists for the adoption of newborns and their constantly carping parents who will simply not let up. Both Cherry and Andy succeed in carving out a little piece of freedom. But they also know that their personal coming out will, in turn, force their parents into a closet, since they do not want to acknowledge their children’s homosexuality in public.