Banned from screening in China, Bel ami, which is released here in cinemas this Wednesday, January 28, interweaves the trajectory of a lesbian couple and a melancholic middle-aged gay man in a repressive regime. Jun Geng signs a bittersweet comedy where loving becomes, in itself, a political act.
Presented at the Cheries-Chéris festival, Bel ami attracted our attention as much for the delicacy of its gaze as for its censorship in China, the authorities deeming its message “subversive”. This dramatic comedy, shot in a stylized black-and-white within a small town in the northeast of the country, unfolds a choral narrative where intimate trajectories cross in the oppressive shadow of the Chinese regime. Jun Geng (who previously directed Manchurian Tiger in 2021 and Free and Easy in 2017) here examines the disillusionment of characters who seek to love freely in a country that denies them this possibility.
Although the title evokes Maupassant’s literary classic, Bel ami is nothing like an adaptation and resembles more the contemporary painting of conflicted emotions. At the heart of this minimalist tableau, Mr. Qu Wenshan, a man in his fifties, goes through a period of disarray after the rupture d’avec son compagnon. Married once in his youth, he now tries to fully embrace his desire despite the loneliness and guilt that this late emancipation brings. In parallel, Liu Ying and Abu, a lesbian couple, are trying to conceive a child. Lacking legal recognition and under family pressure, they consider an arrangement with the neighborhood gay barber, who could serve them both as a donor and a social cover.
“Love is not rational”
With this sixth feature, the Chinese filmmaker interweaves the misadventures of characters who respond to and contradict one another, subtly revealing the same struggle: to reconcile their feelings within a rigid framework. Behind its narrow aesthetics and nagging rhythm, Bel ami regularly backfires on itself, creating turning points toward the absurd or even the burlesque. Jun Geng playfully twists the codes imposed by the Communist regime, going so far as to have one of the characters hum “The Internationale” in a sequence that is as incongruous as it is irreverent.
The emotional density of Bel ami lies less in its lines than in its silences, its averted gazes and its multiple plays of reflections in mirrors. The sound texture, crafted in its bare form, heightens the characters’ isolation as if they were enclosed in a bubble out of time. By employing the same troupe of performers, notably Xu Gang and Zhang Zhiyong who alternate filming with their everyday jobs, Jun Geng envelops his film in a rare cohesion that spreads a troubling sense of familiarity. Behind its discreet humor and its admitted melancholy, Bel Ami asserts with force that “Love is not rational” and that it is simply this irrationality that makes it subversive. By observing the daily life of its protagonists, without misery or grand speeches, Jun Geng delivers a luminous film that is resolutely political in its freedom of tone.
