After his charming but very slight Orz Boys, Taiwanese writer-director Yang Ya-che gets much more ambitious – and hits a brick wall – with Gf*Bf. Initially charming, but quickly wearing out its welcome as it aims higher, Yang’s second feature bundles up 25 years of Taiwan history, thoughts on love and friendship, and (especially) what it means to be gay across the years, and tries to makes these themes cohabit side by side. Well played by its lead trio within the limitations of the shallow script, Gf*Bf ends up like Eternal Summer (FEFF 2007) meets You Are the Apple of My Eye (FEFF 2012) with some major pretensions bolted on in the second half.
The film is at its best when it’s trying the least hardest – which basically means the first flashback, set in 1985 when the three leads are larking around as pals (and more) at high school and the country is still technically under martial law.
This section comes the closest to Orz Boys, and is the most successful at catching the fluid nature of teenage friendships through looks and glances. But it’s disappointing that, for Yang (who was 14 at the time), the mid-80s setting seems to mean only two things: having fun and remaining closeted.
Both those things form the core of the 1990 segment, set during the White Lily pro-democracy student protest in Taipei, whither the trio have now moved from southern Taiwan. It’s during this section, which cements the physical attraction between two of the three and the homosexuality of the third, that the script’s shallowness first starts to show: Yang’s characters are simply surfing on events and are no more than cut-outs themselves. By the time the film reaches 1997 – when the trio are pushing 30 and either are screwed up or have sold out – the movie becomes seriously grating as it pushes for emotional significance. The dialogue in at least one scene (set in a bookshop) is seat-squirmingly arch.
Despite the fact that Yang doesn’t have anything original to say about his cut-outs nor about the periods in which their maturation is set, the three lead actors still manage to make them seem far more interesting than they are on paper.
Anglo-Chinese Rhydian Vaughan basically repeats his Tom Cruise impression from Monga (FEFF 2010), though with much more charm and a looser style that helps gives the film’s first half some kind of shape. Starting slow but gradually becoming the heart of the movie, Joseph Chang (Eternal Summer, Prince of Tears) quietly gives the performance to watch, as a man who’s spent half his life suppressing a physical love for his best pal. However, it’s still a performance in a vacuum as, like the other two actors, he’s given little to work with in the script apart from copious lingering looks and a couple of it’s-so-painful-being-gay scenes.
As Mei-pao, the tomboy-turned-woman in the middle, Gwei Lun-mei’s character often seems more like a script convenience than one in which Yang is really interested, though the actress animates her as best she can and uses her eyes a lot to make up for the shortage of real dialogue. At no time is any explanation given why Mei-pao holds such a large torch for her gay friend but is prepared to sleep with her straight one.
Jake Pollock’s photography has a progressively cooler look as the timeline advances, and is always mobile, strongly recalling his work on Yang Yang. Period design is most notable in the 1985 section but isn’t made much of, beyond a few artefacts.
Derek Elley