Flavia, a Honk Kong thirty-year-old teacher, is married with a son. She has to choose between her family and new love. The choice is traumatic for her, since it brings back a part of herself which belongs to an apparently buried past. As a matter of fact, Flavia falls in love with a young woman she casually meets in a supermarket. She totally surrenders to her and experiences the same intensity of a previous lesbian love she had when she was an adolescent , during the crucial ‘80s, when Hong Kong was going through the Chinese political riots. Meanwhile,, another couple of young women, in today’s Honk Kong, fights against the persistent prejudices which make their relationship difficult. DIRECTOR’S NOTE Butterfly is about a married schoolteacher who needs to choose between her family and love affair. On the one hand, there is her husband and her child, but there is another woman on the other. A few sub-plots emerge from her life: her lesbian lover students, her first love as a lesbian in her schooldays, and her mother's need for love at an older age. This is a love story about homosexuality. It is also a story about honesty, about honesty to oneself! At the end of the story, Flavia says: ?I don’t know. I have been losing things all my life. Now I have also lost my own child. But I have myself. Perhaps this is the only thing that I could ever have, and the only thing that I could never lose?. Times are changing and our society has accepted homosexuality as it is. However, in Hong Kong cinema, homosexuality is still being treated as a gimmick. As a gay film in a Chinese society, there is a need for us to let different voices have the opportunity to express themselves. Although this story is told from the viewpoint of a woman, it shows the multiplicity of identity and the story itself, just like the smell of tealeaves slowly spreading from boiling water. This story has nothing to do with femininity. It is about the care and concern for the correct attitude against one another.?You're not a butterfly if you can't fly!?.
“I am a lesbian”, communicates resolutely the
protagonist of Hudie to the sorrowful (though not much surprised)
husband. Honk Kong cinema of last decade, both mainstream and
the New Queer Cinema, has already shown several lesbians, from
the nostalgic to the soft-core kind (one is from China, Fish and
Elephant by Yu, in Venice in 2001), however this is the first
time that lesbian identity is given such a clear and at the same
time calm voice. With Hudie we are far-off from the soft colonial
homesickness of The Intimates (Zhishu) by Jacob Cheung (HK, 1997),
where homoerotism is sublimated in the mutual act of combing.
We are far from the proto-lesbian soft-core of Intimate Confessions
of a Chinese
|
Country:
Hong Kong
Swaddled
identities
The
reiterate expression of the desire and love between tw women (I
love you, I can’t live without you), break the silence around
lesbian relationships, non more invisible or subject of erotic
male literature: melodrama becomes a political act. However, the
very coming out, the chrysalis becoming a butterfly, takes on
other metaphoric connotation. With respect to China, representing
homologation, orthodoxy, the one model, that is eteronormative
ideology, Honk Kong is the other, minority, queerness. That is
a vast queerscape, as Gordon Brent Ingram says. Even after the
“necessary marriage”, represented by the handover, Hong Kong maintains
its own identity, a secret soul, a need/temptation to break chrysalis
and bloom out (again). The protagonist’s earlier relationship
happened Tian’anmen riots, when Honk Kong was not yet united to
the motherland”, though the risk was apparent on the televisions
all over the world. Jin, the lover, is already out, involved in
politics, a goer, restless, far too much ahead for her times,
certainly too ahead with respect to Flavia. The tacks entering
Tian’anmen Square destroy Jin’s illusion, while Flavia yields
to the family’s pressure. Handover. Marriage. A daughter. A comfortable
middle-class life in post handover Honk Kong, where unchanged
affluence gives the illusion that nothing has changed. A feeling
of guilt for leaving the lover (who has become a Buddhist nun:
it is still melò, it is still Hong Kong!), hands being washed
continuously (the most frequent gesture in the film). When passion
comes back, through a determined, seductive and disenchanted young
woman, it is a mature passion, involving painful though necessary
and conscious choices. Gege (Brother) was the unsuccessful quest
of the missing elder brother, of a mute, elusive and selfish China,
of a lost identity Hudie is about the end of the quest, the arrival,
about acquired, asserted identity. Sexual identity, for the time
being. Maybe political or national identity in the future. | SECTIONS |
China news |