Blue Gate Crossing (2002, Yee Chih-yen) (Patreon)

72/100

Second viewing, last seen New Year's Day 2004. Because I haven't kept tabs on Yee—he's apparently made only three subsequent features, none of which got a major fest berth (whereas this one premiered in the Fortnight of my very first Cannes, though obviously I didn't see it there) or even a minuscule U.S. release—I got to be floored all over again by the delicate formal and tonal control he brings to what could easily have been a banal afterschool special. Actually, the logline now sounds more like an eminently ignorable Netflix exclusive: Female BFFs in high school, one of whom has a searing crush on a hot jock and sends the other to do teen-style scouting; he instead falls for the emissary, who turns out to be secretly in love with her friend. (To be fair, that could also be Shakespeare, especially since Blue Gate keeps its queer element implicit until quite late in the going.) Every possible cliché gets neatly sidestepped, though, and the emotional register remains inchoate throughout, honoring the degree to which nobody at that age has a fixed identity or the barest self-understanding. These are kids romantic enough to believe that you can make someone fall in love with you by writing his name again and again and again until the pen runs out of ink, but also pragmatic enough that what they write on their school's graffiti wall, revealed only in the film's final shot, turns out to be no revelation at all—just further evidence of a girl's efforts to be "normal," accompanied by a boy's simple, traditional assertion of his existence at a specific place and time. 

It's the perfect ending, because Blue Gate Crossing constantly deflects what would ordinarily be this sort of hormonal melodrama's signature moments. When Kerou impulsively kisses Yeuzhen, who's utterly oblivious to her friend's desire, Yeuzhen just continues the story she's been telling as if nothing had happened; there is an uncomfortable reaction, but it's both slightly delayed and so understated that we have to rely on Kerou's expression to confirm that their dynamic has shifted. Shihao, while cocky and gorgeous—we're talking here about a dude so BMoC that he woos girls with his yearbook bio ("I'm a Scorpio, guitar club, swimming team")—keeps seeing his attempts to be a standard Secretly Sensitive Hunk rejected, both by Kerou and by the film itself. In the film's finest conventionally dramatic scene, she asks him to tell her a secret and dismisses not only his pretty damn good first attempt (he dislikes swimming, the sport for which he's celebrated on campus, because it's so solitary), but his blockbuster follow-up confession that he's a virgin. On the grounds that who gives a shit, lots of kids are virgins, tell me something real, please. Astonishing. More frequently, Yee connects the two sans dialogue, orchestrating tentative pas de deux via blocking and depth of field. They engage in a game of playful one-upmanship right at the beginning, before they've even met: Stopped on their bikes at the same stoplight, each keeps inching forward in turn, as if they're in a race, he gazing openly at her with a crafty grin, she clocking him in her peripheral vision (and largely out of focus). Later, tracking shots oscillate in time with Shihao swimming laps in the background and Kerou keeping pace with him on land in the foreground. Did I mention that one of them is gaga for someone else entirely? Yeuzhen does arguably get shafted a bit in this love triangle—ideally, all three characters would be equally rich and nuanced—but the actors are uniformly terrific (though pride of place must go to Guey Lun-mei, who did in fact make the '03 Skandies' Actress roster, though I have no record of my own votes), and Taiwan's cinema is so dominated by giants like Yang and Tsai that I'm grateful for the reminder that there are other corners to explore.