Queerpanorama

This artsy little film basically follows a young gay guy bouncing through one hookup after another across Hong Kong, and what makes it interesting isn't really the sex itself but everything that happens around it, these long, drifting conversations between him and whoever he's with, sometimes a bit clichéd, sometimes genuinely thoughtful, about life and the world and where they all fit into it. Most of the men he meets aren't even originally from Hong Kong either, just like him in a way, all these transplants who've landed in the same sprawling city and keep crossing paths through an app. There isn't much more story than that, which made me think this is really just the director using one guy's hookups as a way to look at intimacy and loneliness across this whole scattered community of men.

Our lead is in his twenties, gay, single, restless about what he's actually doing with his life, and almost constantly horny, and the film just rides along with him from one encounter to the next, each one feeling distinct from the last. What's interesting is that every time he meets someone new, he reinvents himself a little, borrowing pieces of whoever he just slept with to build the story he tells the next guy. It starts with an Iranian biologist, then an architect whose own boyfriend, a flight attendant, is into kink. From there he meets a Thai bartender moonlighting in sex work who's clearly avoiding going home, then has a quick hookup with a delivery guy, then spends time with an older man still grieving a dead partner and visibly stuck in his own grief. Eventually he circles back to that flight attendant from earlier and finishes with a Black dancer. No matter who he's with, the conversations keep landing on the same handful of things, loss, ambition, just trying to get through life, and it's that overlap that quietly ties all these very different men together. Underneath all of it though, he's clearly not at peace with who he is, and more than once we catch him crying alone after everyone's gone.

Shot in this striking black and white that makes the whole thing feel almost dreamlike, the film is visually gorgeous and completely unashamed about the sex, but it's also a little muted and closed in, almost too contained for its own good. What it really ends up capturing is just how lonely a lot of gay men feel while constantly meeting strangers off hookup apps. The men our lead meets cover every kind of life you can imagine, broke or wealthy, grieving or completely secure, American, Chinese, Thai, British, Iranian, and even though each encounter feels different on its own, they all seem to be circling the same need for connection, just without any of the usual relationship expectations attached. The film also doesn't shy away from showing the mechanics of these hookups in real detail, poppers, lingerie, sex toys get just as much screen time as the quieter, more tender moments like cuddling afterward, and almost every encounter is followed by one of these long, meandering conversations once the sex is over. For him, all of this seems to be doing a few different jobs at once, it's casual contact, it's a break from his own unsettled sense of self, and maybe, in flashes, something closer to actual connection. But he's still profoundly alone underneath it all, and that comes through in these quiet little moments, dancing by himself, getting himself off with a toy, constantly chasing some form of closeness with people he barely knows. By the end the film feels like an interesting, if slightly repetitive, study of what actually connects gay men across every kind of background once you strip away the apps and the hookups, which mostly comes down to loneliness and a string of fleeting moments that never quite add up to enough. (6/10)