Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)You don't need flashy direction and big budgets when you have interesting characters, tangible dilemmas, and troubled human relationships. Here is a good example. A quiet love story taking place in Hong Kong between Hugh, a 49 year old professor of English literature and his Chinese student, 19 year old Mark.
The two men are from very different worlds. Hugh is a neurotic character, sensing that his life is slipping away from him. He is writing a play about a long-lost love-affair, but can't get it published. This frustrates him no end, and he has problems concentrating on his job at the University.
Into his life enters Mark, a polite, intelligent Chinese boy, very Confucian, but he seems more sure of himself. He wants Hugh badly, but Hugh is keeping a distance. The key scene happens near the end, when a failed phone-call proves critical.
This film benefits from several viewings. The people grow on you, and what seems like stiff acting is actually restraint, modesty, a reluctance to let themselves go. The good manners of Chinese culture is very much in evidence in Mark and Hugh. Yet, this doesn't retract from the movie, it merely allows you to project you own emotions into the characters. Very Checkovian, you might say.
As for the gay content, expect nothing explicit. But other than that, this is very good indeed.
Note: The film lasts 50 minutes.
Click Here to see more reviews about: First Love and Other Pains (1999)
Delighting gay festival-goers around the world, the two audience favorites FIRST LOVE AND OTHER PAINS and ONE OF THEM explore the phenomenon of first love - the discovery, the thrill, the fear, and the heartache. In FIRST LOVE AND OTHER PAINS, student Mark (Alex Wong Shing-yip) begins an English Literature course under British professor Hugh Graham (Edmund Strode). Mark is one of the few bright lights in Hugh's class and, in truth, his life. Depressed by his inability to get his play published in the UK, while also suffering creative burnout and a feeling of increasing irrelevance, Hugh seeks solace from the bottle - and young men he picks up in bars. Mark, who has lost both of his parents and lives with his aunt, follows Hugh one day and discovers that his teacher is also a playwright. The youth catches one of the two performances the play receives (the actors on-stage are Wes Wong and Oliver Williams from STANLEY BELOVED) and begins to seek Hugh out--visiting his office, inviting him out for drinks--until one of these meetings ends with the two sleeping together. From the co-directors of the camp hit Desperate Remedies comes ONE OF THEM. Set in the 1960s, two gay teens grappling with their mixed-up emotions and emerging sexuality strike up a friendship fortified by frank talk about fashion design and ogling cute boys, all to make the taunts and boredom of small-town life almost bearable.
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