For a long time now I’ve been thinking about Michelle Yeoh. At the start of March, Criterion Channel put together a lineup of eight of her movies, some rarer than others, starting with her first, the loud and fun Yes, Madam! (1985) and culminating with the evergreen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). I don’t intend to go too much into my personal life, but the past months have been unimaginably hard, and the only thing that gave me joy was watching Hong Kong movies and anything starring Michelle Yeoh.
It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed movies this much at all. Maybe that’s because, while about as old as I am now, a sleuth of Hong Kong movies feels so totally youthful, livelier, and fresher than any movie I have seen recently. Plots are at once frantic and succinct, making the movies seem sort of “ad hoc” and unpretentious. With their compact 90 minutes and creative detail, they often remind me of studio-system Hollywood movies. But their urban locations, young actors, and fantastical plots also convey spontaneity, effortlessness, appearing like something “anyone” could have made. And then there’s the elegant immediacy of the fight scenes. These movies seem so real, so close, so fun! My friend Philip likens their choreography and skill to the musical, and that seems the exact point—watching movements of violence and grace. But there’s also a weird anxiety and melancholy driving these movies, a feeling one senses in the movies of Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To: an unease about the future, perhaps about Hong Kong’s reunion with China, a sense that the glory days of movies are coming to a close.
Another thing that struck me was how ambiguously homosocial spheres seem depicted. From what I’ve seen, homosexuality is barely referenced until the mid-nineties, but gender-nonconformity, transgression, and gestures we would today label as “queer” abound, such as Cantopop diva Anita Mui’s seductive appearance in male drag in Rouge (1987), or Michelle Yeoh passing for a man in Wing Chun (1994). Though fight-scenes are typically “hands off,” women touch and observe each other liberally. Stanley Kwan, the director of the magnificent Rouge (1987) and Center Stage (1991), also directed the illuminated essay film Yang ± Yin (1996), which is currently up on Criterion Channel (thank you Criterion Channel!). I was not prepared for how understated and polemical Kwan’s inquiry would be. Several times, he flat-out asks other filmmakers why they omitted gay elements, or turned a gay subtext straight (interestingly, a frequent occurrence of “straight-washing” for Kwan is the sexual confusion between a boy and a straight girl dressed as a boy—a plot element that, while a betrayal for Kwan, might easily be read as a trans storyline today). Leslie Cheung complains about the lack of acceptance for female drag, when, according to him, Anita Mui gets to play men all the time— all the way to kissing a woman in Who's the Woman, Who's the Man? (1996), a romcom I was only able to find while traveling in Europe, and without subtitles. Cheung’s complaint seems poignant to him personally, considering his depression and eventual suicide (both Cheung and Anita Mui, two gorgeous stars who died young, make Kwan’s Rouge all the ghostlier), but I also wonder about what he does not consider addressing—of how the acceptability of women dressing as men also leads to a kind of erasure (Lesbians receive only a few dedicated moments in Kwan’s essay).
I know next to nothing about Chinese cinema. It seems like I am at the start of a long investigation full of misunderstandings, some more intentional than others. Given that I do not know Cantonese or Mandarin, it seems particularly inviting to interpret and infer my own fantasies onto the action. One of these is my willful misreading of Michelle Yeoh. As far as I know, Yeoh does not identify as lesbian or bisexual in real life, despite her public flirtation with other female celebrities, specifically co-star Jamie Lee Curtis for the promotion of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), in which the two play lovers in a universe so alternative, the characters possess literal sausage fingers. Indeed, Yeoh’s current cult-status and deification has come with plenty of Lesbian memes, most commonly the “and history would say they were just friends”-wording above a photo of her and Curtis kissing on the lips and holding hands. I have few illusions about Yeoh’s actual queerness—but that has little consequence on my reading. I can’t help but see her performances imbued with a subtle lesbianism. There’s Yeoh’s nonchalant butch-ness for one—in addition to her incredible work as a martial artist, she is as tough and swaggering as a male hero in Yes, Madam! (1985), in which Yeoh exchanges heated glances with Cynthia Rothrock, or her soft-butch cop in Royal Warriors (1986)—see also her cheeky adventuress in Magnificent Warriors (1987), who reminds me of a female Han Solo. Perhaps it’s a willful misinterpretation of the prudishness of a bygone era, but Yeoh’s characters show as little interest in other men as her male colleagues do. For instance, while the plot builds towards it, there’s never an actual love triangle in Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) between Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, and Yeoh—yet an unwitting viewer might as well interpret Yeoh as competing with Chan for Cheung. As the title heroine in Wing Chun (1994), Yeoh appears in male drag, besting all men in battle, and is in the French dubbing alternately referred to as “he” and “she.” Her character cares for a younger woman with such attentiveness, other men assume Yeoh’s character is the young woman’s husband (not included in the Criterion line-up, I could only find the movie on YouTube in French with English subtitles—I highly recommend watching at least this scene). It’s the chemistry, or the gentleness with which Yeoh approaches other female characters, that I find striking. Her reaction to other women on-screen is usually an opportunity for her melodramatic work to shine, full of nuance and intensity: from her eye-contact with Jen in Crouching Tiger to, above all else, the ambiguousness of and variety of emotion she shares with Anita Mui.
The most magical and sexually ambiguous of Criterion’s curated lineup are of course the two Heroic Trio (1993) movies (the second is Executioners, also from 1993). Starring Yeoh, Mui, and Maggie Cheung as a trio of cloaked superheroines, Heroic Trio is a recognizable precedent to one of my favorite movies, Irma Vep (1996) in which Heroic Trio appears as a cameo. To me they were a revelation, the movies that started this whole exploration of Hong Kong cinema. Again, there is a greater immediacy and choreography than with the contemporary comic book adaptation, and a good deal more zaniness (I thought of the vim and verve of DC’s Batgirls Series from last year, but sexier, faster, and somehow less pretentious). The chemistry between the women is charged; all three superheroes gaze at each other with greater feeling than at anyone else in the films, enough to make the exchange of their glances, their clasping of hands, as much as their fighting and fantastical attire, the whole point of the film. Little or no attention is given to the male characters, and heterosexual romances come across as implausible. If anything, the Heroic Trio movies read like a Lesbian superhero franchise. In the second film, Yeoh and Mui (self-labelled “sisters”) appear more like a domestic couple: the make heart eyes at each other, eat at the same table, and share a bathtub. Completed by Cheung’s playfulness, the three women become a veritable little family, a polyamorous triad parenting Anita Mui’s child.
My delight culminated in Ann Hui’s The Stunt Woman (1996). Yeoh plays Ah Kam, a stunt woman whose life gradually turns into the type of movie she is usually making. An element of nonchalant breathless nouvelle-vague-ish-ness (I thought of Truffaut’s La nuit américaine, 1973) seamlessly gives way to a noir romp. The film is at once melodramatic and thrilling, with a thoughtful character study at its center. Yeoh’s Ah Kam is fascinating to behold in her paradoxes. She’s soft-spoken and tomboyish, self-sufficient, and tough, with steely determination and vulnerability, all the while infused with a subtle eroticism left out of sight in Yeoh’s blunter roles. Ah Kam seems surprised by her sexuality, shown with the kind of restraint (this restraint later resurfaces in Yeoh’s performance in Crouching Tiger) as she gets involved with a handsome low life while secretly pining after her boss, the film director Chief. In a scene I love, Chief prods Ah Kam on her love life. It turns out, he’s assumed she’s gay—obviously, so did. The Stunt Woman is a fun and wild movie that breathes through the wildness of its own making—a note that enters the film in its final moment, during which the audience witnesses, with hardly any warning, the real Michelle Yeoh suffering a terrible injury on set. For a moment, unprepared to see Michelle Yeoh so hurt, I felt abused by Ann Hui’s decision to show an on-set accident. I don’t want to see an actor injured—least of all a movie star I love! (You can listen to Yeoh tell the story of her accident—complete with her mimicking the cracking sound her back made—on Marc Maron’s podcast) My stance changed instantly with a subtitle announcing Yeoh’s decision to dedicate the movie “to all stunt actors”—the heroic, the unsung—turning the terrible footage of her, unmoving and visibly in shock, into a weird and moving elegy to the agony and ecstasy of moviemaking. A poetic feat.
On the same note as the Stunt Woman, it seems that Yeoh frequently plays women who pine after inaccessible men (a rando scientist in Heroic Trio as much as Li Mu Bai in Crouching Tiger). From this contemporary western Lesbian standpoint, Yeoh’s characters’ heterosexuality, much like her real-life persona’s, hardly matters—rather, the choice of inaccessible heterosexual partners could be interpreted as further proof of homosexuality. One could amount this to a stubborn lack of comprehension from this here audience member, who, like other Westerners, might not fully understand the nuances of jianghu (knighthood?), which contributes to the plausibility of the chaste romance between Shu Lien (Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.[1] The chivalric romance between Yeoh and Yun-fat, which frames the plot of the movie, could be read as Yeoh’s character Shu Lien being romantically interested in Jen (Ziyi Zhang), the heroic villain whose mischief Shu Lien thwarts and sees through (there are several scenes in which Shu Lien clocks Jen—one in which calligraphy is compared to a sword, another where a teacup is caught from falling; both read to me as sexy double-entendres). Such a Lesbian inference would also increase the movie’s narrative symmetry: the film’s nemesis, Jade Fox (Pei-Pei Cheng), is very legibly coded as a queer woman, with overt queer implications for Jen and her ambivalent gender. A bisexual or queer reading of the triangle between Shu Lien, Li Mu Bai, and Jen results in an equality between the characters to balance the storyline surrounding the titular plot (that of the actual crouching tiger and hidden dragon, the love story between Jen and her boyfriend Lo) at its center. This kind of reading, or Lesbian inference, according to film scholar Patricia White, is most familiar to me in classical Hollywood cinema, where women fight or collaborate and take interest only in each other. Occasionally, the women are sisters or mothers and daughters, or teachers and students. Interestingly Crouching Tiger, while heavily marketing itself to a Western Audience, chose to intentionally emphasize a progressive, feminist bent. By exploring the nuance and tension between Shu Lien and Jen, the contemporary audience is practically guided directly into this ambiguous reading.
I’d like to end with a photo. I don’t have any context for this, but here’s young Michelle Yeoh wearing an Anita Mui t-shirt (in Rouge, no less!)
Further Gay Recommendations
Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera
Tomorrow night—April 20th—is the last chance to catch the phenomenal Lise Davidsen as the Marschallin, and to see the number one most Lesbian opera—one of the greatest operas of them all—before it goes on pause for the ‘23-‘24 Season.
Loving Highsmith (2022) on Criterion Channel
Directed by Swiss filmmaker Eva Vitija, Loving Highsmith focuses exclusively on the women in Highsmith’s life and graciously lays low on the grotesque excesses of Highsmith’s later mental illness and disturbing politics. A true labor of love, the film functions as an archive of a world now lost—most women interviewed, such as Ann Aldrich and Tabea Blumenschein, have since passed away. I loved Loving Highsmith and will probably write about it again.
Good Manners (2017) on Shudder
Plunging deep into the fantastical, with a neon-light saturated night-scape and a coolly designed, speculative Brazilian metropolis as its backdrop, Good Manners mulls over class differences and Lesbian parenthood as a housekeeper becomes involved with her boss—a wealthy, pregnant werewolf. A satisfying monster movie.
Thunder on the Hill (1951) on Criterion Channel
A nun so moved by a female prisoner—a murderess!—she becomes a detective. Most of this movie is a snore, but I loved the simmering undertones and the tease of what would soon become the Douglas Sirk melodrama.
Some of the Gay Reading I’ve Done Recently:
Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (Two Women and A Poisoning), Alfred Döblin
This one came as a surprise. While visiting my father in his house near Vienna, a house in which I was certain I had read every piece of Lesbian literature around, I was examining a collection of Döblin and came across this little book! The sad part: it’s actually not very good—early 20th Century German “true crime” fiction that showcases the limits of psychology in literature. Where I was hoping for something exciting, like Celle qui n'était plus (the fun 1952 novel that inspired the even more fun, though straight-washed, 1955 French noir Les diaboliques), I found only the question: what came first, male brutality or female homosexuality? Granted, the frequency of this question in 20th century culture is not all Döblin’s fault, and his little novella-length fact-fiction is a good resource for learning about German mores around female homosexuality a century ago.
Speaking of murderous lesbian friends: Juliet Hulme/Anne Perry (aka Kate Winslet’s character in Heavenly Creatures, 1994) has passed away.
Mistakes Were Made, by Meryl Wilsner / What We Do We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart
A wonderfully smutty Young Adult Novel about a girl who scores with an older woman, then realizes the older woman is her best friend’s mom. This pulpy, implausible wish-fulfillment novel was a nice counterpoint to the promising but ultimately disappointing What We Do We Do In The Dark by Michelle Hart, about an affair between an older woman and a college girl grieving her mother, which was marketed as “literature.” Interestingly, both books manage to tiptoe around their taboos: Wilsner plows right into any hint of danger and turns it into cotton candy (while Wilsner is a talented erotica writer, reading them felt like watching a jump and run character swerve and dash at every opportunity to show a squeakily correct, cute world). Michelle Hart on the other hand approaches moral ambiguities with such earnestness, even the most salacious thrill becomes a downer.
The Kingdom of Sand, by Andrew Holleran
Holleran writes effortlessly about the proximity of life and loss. Erudite as his work is, it’s also carnal and sexy (my favorite story of his, The Ossuary, describes a man flummoxed after a gay monk steals a tiny bone out of the ashes of his lover—a perverse Bringing Up Baby among the AIDS generation). The Kingdom of Sand continues Holleran’s usual spiel—a mixture of queer cultural anthropology and melancholy—into the realms of late-life questions, geriatric facilities, and nursing homes. I did not expect the solace, understated humor, and joy this book would offer.
That’s it, thank you for reading from my lil Gay Cahier! I vow to keep the next newsletter half this length.
Now you tell me: which queer cultural items have you been consuming of late?
[1] as explained in Felicia Chan’s essay “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural Migrancy and Translatability” (2009).
I'm sure you've prob heard of Ainu/Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (1972) but it's an amazingly campy HK wuxia with a lesbian arc! + Not sure how to find her films with subtitles but Margaret Tu Chuan was a bi actress in HK during the late 50s-60s, inc. in some films by Li Han-hsiang which tend to be visual feasts... it's an absolute goldmine of an industry to look into imo, really enjoyed this!