‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: Critics Week Award Winner Tells Story Of Grief And Rebirth In New York Chinese Community – Cannes Film Festival
deadline.comBlue Sun Palace was one of the prize winners at the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival where it took the French Touch award of the Cannes Critics week selections (Simon Of The Mountains took the Grand Prize, the other major award from the section).
French “Touch” is an ironic name for an award to a film where “touch” is key in several scenes depicted in the massage parlor setting where much of the movie takes place.
The feature film debut of Chinese American Director/Writer Constance Tsang focuses on three main characters, immigrants to New York, specifically Flushing in Queens where Didi (Haipeng Xu) and Amy (Le-Xi Wu) operate the Blue Sun Palace, a massage parlor/nail shop where the front door clearly notes “No Sexual Services” at this establishment.
Filmed almost entirely in the Mandarin language, we see the everyday moments of their work life as well as personal, including Didi’s affair with a married man, Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng) who is working a dull construction job to make enough money to send back home to his ill mother, wife and kid, all at home in Taiwan while his American dream is not-all-that.
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