Bel Ami is a curious and often compelling entry in the canon of queer Chinese cinema — one that blends stylized melancholy with pointed political subtext. Filmmaker Geng Jun’s most sophisticated critique emerges not through overt polemic, but through a clever parallel between queer dynamics of dominance and submission and the repressive structures of state power. In one standout scene, a male character sings the communist anthem “The Internationale,” invoking both the revolutionary spirit and the double meaning of tongzhi (comrade/queer), while subtly rebuffing the authority of a queer woman who attempts to curtail his agency. In another moment, two women engage in a kungfu-esque pantomime — an absurd yet moving gesture of resistance and solidarity, casting their queerness as part of an imagined jiang hu, a mythic underworld where alternate forms of connection and belonging flourish amid societal constraint.
Unlike Geng’s previous work, which often traps its characters in noir-inflected spirals of bad luck and worse decisions, Bel Ami yearns for something more emotionally direct — an earnestness that sometimes feels at odds, and in nonproductive ways, with its own airless aesthetic design. The film’s black-and-white cinematography, almost incessant Gallic score, and even its French-language title all betray its seeming ambition to convey the painful, raw realities of queer life in today’s China. At its best, the film offers glimpses of that aching clarity — of queer desire as both a tender impulse and a political act — but its self-conscious stylization too often curdles into pandering arthouse-isms.
Shot seemingly under the radar of censors in remote Heilongjiang province and produced by the Paris-based Blackfin Production, Bel Ami follows the now-familiar path of recent queer Chinese films that navigate censorship by relying on international funding. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach — but paired with the film’s conspicuously Westernized stylistic gestures, Geng’s vision loses some of the specificity and urgency found in the best of China’s queer underground cinema, by directors like Cui Zi’en, Ying Weiwei, and Jiang Zhi.
Ultimately, Bel Ami stands as a telling case study in the gentrification of Chinese arthouse cinema, a trend that increasingly resembles the dynamics of the “world music” market from two or so decades ago. With little domestic infrastructure to support truly subversive or innovative filmmaking, many Chinese directors turn to international support, but their interlocutors often remain more focused on satisfying the demands of global festival audiences, and the slates they curate tend to be populated by films that feel like vaguely Sinicized versions of familiar European arthouse tropes. Geng is clearly more talented than most working within this export-oriented model, but he still falls into many of the same traps with Bel Ami.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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