This afternoon heavy snow started falling, and on the way home I spun out, so I didn’t dare drive out again afterward. On this dull evening, I remembered seeing a report a few days ago mentioning that Daniel Wu’s first film was Portland Street Blues… Lost Love (美少年之恋), so I went and watched it on Youku.

Although I’ve seen plenty of films in this genre, in all sorts of varieties and styles, a pure, beautifully innocent love story like this always makes me watch on with longing and a sense of romance. The Love of Siam is like that, Get Real is like that, Summer Storm is like that, Beautiful Thing is like that, Starcrossed is like that… these are the kinds of works that touch some still-unformed nerve in us. The film I watched today, Portland Street Blues… Lost Love, belongs to that same category.

The film carries a fairly rich amount of content, and is said to portray certain aspects of the gay community fairly realistically. Many viewers who’ve seen this film tend to focus on the handsome leads, but I’d rather take a calmer approach and analyze the inner psychological world of the character Sam (played by Daniel Wu).

Sam is, first and foremost, an obedient, sensible boy next door — as his mother says, good grades, strong body, very well-behaved. After work he happily cooks for his parents at home, and keeps everything tidy and in order. Compared to MB Ah Jet and the big star K.S., Sam is unquestionably the more “exemplary” kind of gay man. Yet there’s another side to Sam that’s rather cold and calculating. He treats Ah Qing, who loves him deeply, with utter heartlessness — even later, running into him on the street, he pretends not to know him at all. This kind of character makes me feel that, at the end of the film, Sam’s suicide note comes across as somewhat affected — I even find myself doubting whether he ever truly loved Jet at all!

Because his father discovers his sexual orientation, Sam chooses suicide to escape the person he loves most — judgment and condemnation from his family (though in truth, this judgment and condemnation is largely something he imposed on himself). This act reflects just how long he had been suppressing himself. Looking closely: when he was with Ah Qing, suppressed by a sense of obligation toward love, he never told him the truth — that the love between them was already over; when he was with Jet, he never told him that he actually cared for him, only letting Jet find out after his death. I’d like to borrow the title of a book by Li Yinhe to say to him: you needed comfort so badly.

Sam’s death is worth dwelling on. He, Jet, and K.S. each represent a different type of handsome gay man: the diligent, responsible type; the carefree, dissolute, youthfully wild type; and the dazzlingly charismatic type who keeps reinventing himself by attaching to whoever holds power. The first type is somewhat perfect, the second somewhat decadent, the third looks beautiful on the surface. They all wear a shining exterior, yet live very different lives underneath. Is this meant to prove that the harder someone tries to love, the more wholeheartedly they try to live, the more they end up rejected by life itself?

In short, Sam’s case is, on one hand, a casualty of mainstream social culture, and on the other, an inevitable product of his own personality.