The Chinese title of Tony Ayres' Walking on Water translates as "If you love me, kill me" (愛我就殺死我). Many expected an action thriller with black humor, making it one of the best-selling works showing at the Taipei Film Festival. But such expectations couldn't have been more wrong.
The film won the 2002 Teddy Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, an award for gay and lesbian films. It also shot Tony Ayres, a relative unknown in the European market, into the limelight at the very gay-friendly Berlinale.
Back home in Australia, the film won five major prizes in last year's Australian Film Institute Awards. With the film's success, people realized that Ayres had also made eight short films and was also the author of a short story collection.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TEF
"When you see the film, you know that it is not about being gay at all," said Ayres in an interview last Friday, visiting Taipei for the film festival.
It is a story about how people deal with loss and grief. The film begins with two people helping their terminally ill roommate and best friend Gavin to die in a dignified and less painful way. But things do not go as planned.
First, a massive dose of morphine doesn't work. And then, after the funeral, the two both embark on an emotional rollercoaster: illicit affairs, taking the leftover morphine, breaking-up, caustic arguments and unwitting betrayals.
As its Chinese title suggests, the film contains intense emotions. While the material could make it a conventional melodrama, Ayres view of his characters and events is refreshingly unsentimental.
"I try not to use the conventional way to talk about the way people deal with death. Grief is such a complicated and confusing emotion and everyone has his own way responding to it," said Ayres.
Speaking of unconventional, Ayres has every reason to be different. Apart from Walking on Water, the film festival is also showing three short films which more clearly and boldly reveal Ayres' background.
China Dolls (1997) is a reflection on the issue of race and sexuality. Here the China dolls are not Chinese girls but Asian gay men in Australian society. In the film, Ayres present the taunting nomenclature of the gay subculture: rice queens (Caucasian men who prefer Asian men), potato queens (Asians who prefer Caucasians), sticky rice (Asian for Asian), and fruit salad (all colors welcome). On the other hand, he had different Asian men talk about their experiences facing all these stereotypes.
Ayres also appears in the film confessing his own racial complex being a Western-educated Chinese living in Australia.
"I felt excluded because I had such a longing to be in," admitted Ayres in the film, while in front of the camera he symbolically painted his face white.
"Sexual and racial identity is a basic element in my past works," said Ayres, whose parents came from Shanghai and who acquired his surname from his step-father.
Growing up in a completely Western environment, the only Mandarin he could speak was "ni-hao-ma." In his films, he lets us see a world of Chinese Australians who have lived in the country for five generations and in whose lives little Chinese culture can be found.
In Sadness (1999), Ayres features photographer William Yang, a fifth-generation Chinese who journeyed to northern Queensland to explore the murder of his uncle in the 1920s. Juxtaposed with this are photo stories of his close friends who are struggling with AIDS.
Being honest and open about his sexuality, Ayres runs the risk of being stereotyped. Although his new film seeks to go beyond sexual or ethnic politics, he is still asked if he will keep on making gay films.
"I have never thought of myself as either a gay filmmaker or not a gay filmmaker," he said. "When Woody Allen makes a film, he doesn't need to say the film is about straight love," he added.
Tony Ayres' China Dolls, Sadness and Mrs. Craddock's Complaint are showing at Taipei Film Festival today starting 8pm at the Metropolitan Hall located at 25 Pate Rd., Sec. 3, Taipei (
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