The first scene of “Blue Sun Palace” lingers on a couple at dinner, eating a mouthwatering chicken, speaking Mandarin to one another. The man seems older than the woman. They’re on a date, but you can tell something is a little off — like this relationship is very new, or there’s some unresolved power dynamic.
It’s not until after dinner, and a subsequent trip to a karaoke bar, that the pieces of Constance Tsang’s sensitive, lovely and ultimately devastating first feature fall into place. The man is Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), a married Taiwanese migrant who is working a menial job and sending money back to his wife, his daughter and his mother. The woman is Didi (Haipeng Xu), who works in a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens — the Blue Sun Palace — which officially doesn’t provide any “sexual services” but is frequented by a series of men, most of them white, looking for just that. Didi and Cheung, however, have a different kind of relationship, one built partly on companionship, and she sneaks him into Blue Sun Palace to spend the night.
But Didi’s closest friend is another of the Blue Sun Palace employees, Amy (Ke-Xi Wu). Tsang’s film starts out like a chronicle of workplace friendship, albeit an unusual workplace. Amy and Didi hang out on the staircase in their building, eating lunch and sharing dreams and plotting toward the day they’ll head to Baltimore, where Didi’s daughter lives with her aunt, and open a restaurant together. Wu and Xu’s performances are light and full of life, two women who are making the best of a situation that isn’t ideal but certainly could be worse. They and their other co-workers form a network of support and joy. In these early moments, “Blue Sun Palace” feels like it could have some kinship with “Support the Girls,” both films about the community that women build together to survive a world that isn’t made for their them to thrive in. But “Blue Sun Palace” is gentler, with the cinematographer Norm Li’s camera drifting around the space, capturing the play of light or air on a curtain.
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 Blue Sun Palaces a 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.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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