Director: Aragon Yao
Writer: Aragon Yao
Cast: Aragon Yao, Asim Amjad
Running time: 1hr
It’s not dark yet…but it’s getting there. The words of a Bob Dylan song written around the turn of the century. For LGBT people across the world trying to live their lives and express their identities in the years since, in some countries they have seen progress but in others the skies have noticeably darkened.
Progress as to LGBT rights has been most threatened by the recent turn to populist militarist nationalism with its fetishisation of traditional values and its glorification of the easily taxed, easily controlled nuclear family – reliable supplier of bodies for the military machine. The darkness.
The two decades prior to the nationalist turn saw the zenith of hyper-globalisation with its emphasis on the free movement of capital and, in very particular circumstances, the free movement of labour. The years saw the information technology revolution and the development of a global knowledge economy which gave an increasing number of workers the opportunities to study outside their home country and to sell their labour internationally. The latter development provides the setting for Aragon Yao’s biographical feature film – My Dear.
Yao is a young gay man from China undertaking an Erasmus masters in filmmaking at a university in Budapest, Hungary. Whilst away studying in Europe, Yao is separated from his Iranian partner Asim whom he met in China and who still works there. My Dear, was shot on location in Budapest and final production took place in Portugal – the film was submitted in 2023. Yao wrote and directed the movie – his first attempt at filmmaking.
Yao takes an unusual approach to the film bio genre using three discrete but intertwined formats – allegory, shadow play puppetry, and simple observation.
The movie opens with allegory. We see a black screen. Yao speaks in Chinese – while English subtitles tell us – “the insomnia comes back”. Yao continues to recount what we take to be the contents of a dream whilst the camera pans away to shots of a moonlit woodland and a cloaked figure holding a light – forever receding into the distance. By opening with allegory, the director takes a chance as to engagement with the audience so early in the movie, but the cinematography is so superb it smoothly draws us into the dream sequence – it also helps that Yao as the narrator has a mesmerising vocal delivery. We see several more dream sequences later on in the movie using the same format – again at night but on a riverbank – again beautifully shot. In the later sequence, we use the information that we have taken from the observational footage to interpret Yao’s dream as a reification of his inner turmoil – racked by fear of what will happen when his study visa ends and whether he will have to go back to China and no longer be able to be true to his real identity.
Shadow play puppetry. Yao, along with collaborator Dye Lu, uses a form of Chinese puppetry – two-dimensional paper characters set against a simple background with a voice over for the characters. The puppetry scenes are employed to tell the audience about the experience of being a gay man in China and convey the terrors of trying to come out to a straight family. As with the dream sequences, the puppet scenes are beautifully achieved but many are also delivered with a wry, beguiling sense of humour. Watch out for the scene where Yao is walking with his partner and their dog Hugo and Yao speeds up his walking pace, so passersby do not take them for a couple – I found it at the same time profoundly poignant and deeply hilarious.
Harder in tone are the scenes around the family dinner table, where we are introduced to Yao’s tyrannical father and his subservient mother. When the couple are not berating Yao for failing to get married – the father tries to control even the way his son eats – telling him real men eat their food quickly. In a finely judged transition, the director cuts from the latter puppetry scene to a piece of observational footage. We see Yao meeting a college friend for lunch – when the food arrives his buddy devours it ravenously and Yao is visibly repulsed. The crimes against the child haunt their adult life.
I enjoyed perhaps the only overt political reference in the movie – the giant portrait of the meta-patriarch Chairman Mao glowering on the wall of the puppet house – a tyrant hero for a tyrant father. Xi, Putin, Trump, Khamenei – the tyrant posters are always of supposedly straight men.
Interspersed between the allegory and puppetry, is the observational footage which forms the majority of the film. The observational scenes are all filmed under blue skies in limpid sunlight – in stark contrast to the darkness of the allegory and the muted tones of the puppetry. We follow Yao through Budapest as he sets out on a mission. Whatever the long-term future holds for him, Yao is determined to make the most of the relative freedom available to him in Hungary, by learning to become a drag artist.
In a finely edited sequence, we see Yao attending shows and watching drag divas on his phone. One of the divas belts out an anthem – everybody is getting fucked but me. The words of the song perfectly project Yao’s alienation to us the audience – here is a young man uncertain of the future, estranged from their family and cut off from their lover.
As in the dream and puppetry sequences, the observational cinematography is first class. Yao is credited at the top of a list of cinematographers but as he is on screen for all the observational sequences – I would congratulate the whole team as to an excellent body of work. One piece that I found scintillating was so simple yet so well achieved. The camera pans in slow motion down the length of a tramcar looking in through the windows at the various tourists and commuters living their lives – then the camera cuts away to reveal the scene has been shot from a tramcar moving in the opposite direction – we see the sole occupant of the carriage – Yao. The uncertain migrant alone.
The high point for me of the movie came with the depiction of a live video call between Yao and his boyfriend Asim, back in China. Renditions of video calls in indy films are often excruciating – there can be few things more boring in cinematographic terms than watching a talking head talking back to a camera with cutaways to the other speaker. And yet, Yao and his team turn the experience into something extraordinary – an enchanting piece of romantic cinema. As a bonus, we all also meet Hugo the dog. Yao and Asim talk about their uncertain future, the lack of job opportunities and the possibilities of obtaining Australian work visas. The scene has a palpable sense of sadness and longing.
Whilst watching the video call, the complexities of what Yao is trying to achieve with My Dear in terms of self-biography became clearer to me. We are asked to assume that Asim is Asim and not an actor and their conversation is a reality. By our making the assumption, we are ineluctably drawn into Yao’s (and Asim’s) search for a new life outside China. In a deft move, (spoiler alert) the movie does not show us Yao’s unveiling as a drag artist – a route many directors might have taken. We only see Yao practising – again the scenes are beautifully captured and extremely funny – watch out for when Yao sings a low-key ballad and then switches to a high falsetto Beijing Opera voice – to stunning effect. Instead, the director places the video call halfway through the film thus giving the audience the chance to reflect on the meaning of the climactic emotional moment. The placement means for the rest of My Dear we are drawn into rooting for Yao and Asim in their struggle and we realise the successful making of Yao’s debut film (the movie we are watching in real time) is an integral part of the quest. As in the allegory, we begin to follow the hooded figure and the ever-receding light.
There were times, whilst watching My Dear, that I had to remind myself that this was the work of a debut director. The movie is such an accomplished, superbly crafted work of art, and so it was difficult to remember to give extra credit to someone just starting out in indy filmmaking. For IFL readers, try and catch My Dear – you will experience an hour of light in the gathering darkness. And watch out for future work from Aragon Yao – he could become a significant figure in indy cinema.
As to the attacks on freedom and the movement of ideas across the globe, two relevant developments have occurred since My Dear was submitted. In Hungary, the government of the Putin-lite nationalist Viktor Orban has enacted legislation to make LGBT ‘propaganda’ illegal and to criminalise any teaching about LGBT identities in schools. In China, the CCP has shut down LGBT information centres on the grounds that they are purveyors of ‘foreign’ influence. In patriarchal nationalist rhetoric, LGBT identities are always a product of the external other.
However, reflecting on Portugal, the country where My Dear was put together after filming – we can maybe follow Yao’s cloaked figure holding the light. OK, Portuguese society is far from perfect, but in the years since the 1974 Carnation Revolution, it has moved from a fascist police state with an all-pervading domestic spy network to become one of the freest places on the planet. A society fit for humanity where individuals can express their identities. Maybe Gramsci’s Optimism of the Will is a thing, after all.