Moneyboys (C.B. Yi, 2021) (Patreon)

Another film that concludes with an emotionally repressed character dancing it out for all the world to see? What hath Beau Travail wrought? Still, this was a surprise of a sort, since most of Moneyboys, the debut film by C.B. Yi, felt like a formalist grab bag of art film techniques that were there mostly just to announce Yi's bona fides. A great deal of Moneyboys plays like a gay version of Goodbye South, Goodbye, with a healthy dash of Tsai Ming-liang-style urban alienation thrown in for good measure.

Still, I don't want to be ungenerous. Moneyboys is a solid enough debut from a filmmaker who shows significant promise. Its subject matter alone is unique, since Chinese cinema is not exactly teeming with intimate portraits of the lives of gay hustlers in Beijing. At the heart of Moneyboys is the inherent conflict between China's rapacious capitalism and the homophobia at the heart of both traditional and Communist belief systems. The film centers on Fei (Kai Ko), a hustler who sends much of his money back home. But when he returns to his village to visit his ailing grandfather, Fei is humiliated by his father's friends, including Fei's uncle (Chai Ming-Hsiu). They want his dirty money, but prefer to disavow him completely.

Life back home now impossible, Fei fully commits himself to his milieu of gay hustler friends. He eventually hooks up with Long (Bai Yufan), a young man from his village who has moved to Beijing to start over. But he has never gotten over Xiaolai (JC Lin), his mentor and first love, who disappeared after being brutally injured while protecting Fei from a violent john. As Yi demonstrates, there is a line of succession among the moneyboys, one man helping to induct the next into the life. This perpetuation of the trade gets muddied by genuine emotion and desire.

Every composition in Moneyboys is crisp, clear, and deliberate. Sometimes he departs from the planimetric, master-shot approach for something showy, like an extended Steadycam shot or a camera tracking around a dinner table. But there's not much of a sense that Moneyboys' plot or theme demanded these affectations. But then, you can probably judge for yourself sometime next year. I'm sure Strand Releasing is already brandishing their checkbook.