This first section is a prelude. On Lunar Near Year, sudden tragedy strikes the massage parlor. It happens so abruptly, and with so little cinematic heralding, that it feels almost happenstance, the full blunt weight of the impact only landing moments later. To underline this, Tsang borrows a page from a number of other films in the recent past (perhaps most notably Ryusuke Hamaguchi in “Drive My Car”) and delays the film’s credits till 30 minutes into the movie, signaling to us where the real story has begun.
It turns out this is not a tale of friendship; it’s a story of grief, and of the unexpected, fraught bonds people build in the midst of it. In the wake of violence, Amy and Cheung fall into a kind of friendship, two people brought together by mutual pain and by their shared experience as immigrants with jobs of necessity. Cheung takes her to the restaurant he took Didi, to the karaoke bar where they’d gone afterward. But Amy is not interchangeable with her friend, or any other woman, as much as the men around her might like to treat her that way.
Exploitation and its tricky contours is a key element in “Blue Sun Palace.” Technically, Amy can leave her job at any time. Technically, Cheung can escape his, too. But in reality, the idea of doing something else is full of peril. Cheung, who sends money to his family back in Taiwan, is outrunning a dark past there. Amy, on the other hand, might be able to find her way out of here.
“Blue Sun Palace” glides at a pace both deliberate and lyrical: We can see what Cheung is doing and sense the grief and pathos behind it. And yet we sense, along with Amy, the exasperation of feeling stuck, of trying to navigate her own sadness and bursting need to get away. Tsang brings a perceptive subtlety to the story, creating a whole world inside the parlor and its inhabitants, while letting us discover along with them what lies beyond. Instead of leaning into trauma or misery, the filmmaker gives us complex characters who nonetheless speak very little — everything happens in their expressions, the quick flash of a twitch across a cheek when the other isn’t looking. It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in “Blue Sun Palace” every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.
Blue Sun Palace
Not rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.
