tlashop.com

Amos Lassen wrote on 03/31/2009:

“My Fair Son”
Reconciliation
Amos Lassen
New from WaterBearer comes Cui Zi’en’s “My Fair Son”, the story of a father and son who struggle to reconcile their separate lives.
Ray returns to live with his father after having been raised by his grandfather. He finds himself unhappy, angry and disconnected over his father’s hard line attitude and middle class way of life. He decides to go to art school and it is there that he meets a student with whom he begins a relationship. When his father finds him naked and in bed with another man, he realizes that he must come to terms with his own feelings about homosexuality which is something to which he had never given much thought.
Ray later meets on his father’s top employees and the two become involved almost immediately. Ray falls deeply on love but the other man is married. Of course there are problems—how will the two get together and what will Ray’s father feel about this.
Cui Zi’en gives is a look at a different China then we usually see. As Ray and his father test the bonds of family, we experience the turmoil of both men. The photography is lush and beautiful and the look at gay life in China is intense. The key issue of familial respect that is such a part of Chinese culture takes on a completely different face in “My Fair Son”.