Stanley Kwan’s romantic drama Lan Yu (2001) is objectively daring. It’s a gay romantic film with frankly depicted sex and makes a plot point out of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, both things that would have been, had it not been made in secret, immediately subjected to censorship. Outside of those instances of boldness, though, the movie is generally shallow, disposed to ellipses that rob it of a dramatic richness it might have otherwise had. 

Lan Yu begins in the late 1980s and fitfully jumps forward in time after that. Its through line is a romance between Chen Handong (Hu Jun), a filthy-rich businessman whose dealings might be shady, and the eponymous character (Liu Ye), who starts the film as an architecture student whose youthful naïvete is betrayed by a skinny frame and the blooms of acne scars on his cheeks. Chen starts their relationship thinking it will purely be physical. Lan, meanwhile, is immediately head over heels, his face falling when Chen blathers early on about how people who know each other too well aren’t meant to stay together — that there’s no point in continuing with a romance once there’s even a whisper of dulled passion.

Chen won’t be able to emotionally maintain that sense of distance for very long. In Lan Yu, the pair cyclically reconnects and then separates over the years, each reunion strengthening Chen’s feelings. The two will face their greatest obstacle when Chen, wearing down under the effects of outside pressure, decides to marry a woman (Fang Lu) who warns him not to bring his emotional baggage into their union. The film peculiarly keeps anything related off-camera post-wedding; engagement with the inevitable dissolution of the compulsorily heterosexual relationship is mostly limited to cursory remarks. 

Knowing more of the specifics of that breakdown — plus other moments from Chen and Lan’s relationship, like a time when Lan, as Chen fondly remembers, filled their bedroom with flowers only to have to reverse course because of a sneezing fit — might have deepened our understanding of the latter. He might be more substantially written than the rather idealized Lan, but he’s still rendered superficially by screenwriter Jimmy Ngai’s overly circuitous script. Given the thinness with which its central relationship is drawn, the film’s sudden tragic ending feels like less of a gut punch than a last-ditch attempt at garnering an emotional reaction the film elsewhere struggles to spur.