Amphetamine (2010)

This and Latter Days are both in first place as best gay film... Thomas Price, half-Chinese, half-Brit, has to be the most beautiful man on the planet, clothed or nude. The story is bittersweet, as the gay man(Prince) tries to earn the love of a fitness trainer, who is straight and about to lose his mother to cancer. There are several balletic sequences, and what makes this film so poetic: the nudity is not sexual. Both men have gorgeous bodies and are living sculptures. Hope to see a lot more of Prince (no pun). Regrettably, there is little biographical info on him online. The film is a masterpiece.

This film has all the makings of a contemporary gay film. Issues of sexual ambiguity, social inequality, family, drug use, and emotional frustration weave their way through a love story highlighted by many nude scenes involving two very beautiful young men. The acting is certainly above average, and most scenes are shot with some truly outstanding cinematography. The music has a playful sober quality that is enhancing and emotionally complementing. Even the plot, a notorious weak spot in most Asian films, is well assembled and largely believable. But if this is all you see in this film, a gay love story wrapped in social issues and male beauty, then you have missed out on what it is all about.

Scud has craftily made a film that affects sensibility beyond mere aesthetics and narrative and the boundary of reason. His film is about transformation and the "equalizing of things," a very old theme in Chinese literature and philosophy. It is about the intuitive and harmonizing demands of life and death, good and evil, reality and illusion, and the integration of seemingly contradictory elements into a whole that defines human happiness and fulfillment. "Amphetamine" is essentially a presentation based on the philosophical underpinnings of the "Butterfly Story" from the "Zhuangzi." Yes, there is something deeper going on in this film. It is something to experience.

Throughout the film Scud interjects dream sequences, shot more like commercial advertising, that are disruptive and seemingly amateurish, at least intially. They are designed to weaken the line between reality and illusion and draw the viewer away from the usual mind set one has when watching a movie. Like Zhuang Zhou, the viewer enters an epoche of bi-polar consciousness seeking harmony: Are you a butterfly dreaming of being a man, or a man dreaming to be a butterfly? The goal of this query in the "Butterfly Story" is to see the harmony of two distinct things and the transformation of one into another. This is symbolized in the film's principal players, Byron Pang and Thomas Price. Pang is poor and working class with its usual characteristics; Price is clearly upscale and involved in high finance with educated and refined tastes. Pang is uncertain of his sexual orientation; Price is inclined to embrace being gay. The goal is to draw the two together, a coincidence of opposites. The two men find ways to bond, including a bungee jumping scene. Pang tries to improve his education as an autodidact, and Price joins Pang for swims and drug use. As the film progresses, the dream sequences become less intrusive but more significant drawing the viewer's frame of mind into the protanganists' efforts at union. Scud manipulates the drug usage to accelerate the increasingly blurry line between reality and illusion and accentuate the characters' disparity: Pang is subject to bouts of psychosis and suicide; while Price is rational embracing life symbolized by a return to his native Australia (island paradise). The contradiction needs resolution, and you are right along with them.

The final scene of the film is shot as a dream sequence. A less careful viewer will think that Pang has committed suicide, but I don't think that this right and is certainly not the thrust of the film. This is not a trajedy. In the end, both men jump off a bridge, a structure given heavy meaning by them in the narrative. It is clearly an echo of the bungee jumping scene, a scene clearly grounded in the real. In the final dream sequence, the viewer is invited into their final act of transformation: the blur between reality and illusion in your mind and the personal inequities of Pang and Price are simultaneously equalized largely through an act of love signified in their jump and all that was opposite is now one. At the end of the film, you experience transcendence not sorrow.

Is it love? Almost certainly. If you crave the romantic, you will find it here. Pang discards his reservations about homosexuality just before the final dream sequence, and Price proposes marriage earlier in the film. But the best expression of their relationship is symbolized in an often used line in the film: "piece of cake."

I don't understand Chinese, so I am working off subtitles, and I assume that the cross-cultural differences don't effect the metaphor. But "cake" has a lot of playful implications in the film. When spoken between the two men, it has the common connotation of something easy, or a sexual metaphor, the sweetness of life. However, in dream symbolism, "piece of cake" can have negative qualities of selfishness, concealment, not fully giving of oneself. The symbol's full meaning is revealed in a scene involving the two men in a dialog about love and their relationship. Pang at one point in the discussion defines love as a giving of oneself. Or from Zhuang Zhou's perspective, an abandonment of self into the other. The transformation of things. It is the love, the cake, that brings conscious and unconscious, the pleasant with the less pleasant, together. An odd but entirely successful employment of a common symbol.

I highly recommend this film. It is truly "a piece of cake."

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Kafka was a hetersexual guy. One day, he witnessed a girl who was about to be raped by a bunch of hooligans. He tried to intervene, but ended up getting raped himself. Since then, he befriended the girl. But the psychological trauma of being raped, the burden of working several jobs day after day, and his mother's incurable illness finally took a toll on him, and he developed an addiction to amphetamine. His grim outlook on life took a turn one day after meeting Daniel, a successful financier who worked for a big investment firm in Hong Kong. They fell in love, and Daniel pledged to love him and protect him for the rest of his life. But happy days only lasted a very brief time. Soon, Kafkas mother died, and he got caught with amphetamine on a trip to China, coupled with his inferiority and his incapability of accepting same-sex love, as well as his phobia of anal sex between men, he committed suicide by jumping off a suspension bridge. There have been numerous films in the past which depicted homosexuals who could not accept their sexual orientation, thus ended up tragically, like killing themselves. To depict a straight guy who turned to same-sex love by will, but also ended up tragically, this was one of the first. However, I think to present same-sex love in such a negative and dark tone are really passe. This is the third installment of the triology on same-sex love by Hong Kong computer-real estate investor-movie director Scud. The previous installments City Without Baseball, and Permanent Residence all explored the inhibitive and the distressing side of same-sex love. One other note, Bryon Pang was a contestant of the 2005 Mr. Hong Kong contest, and had been working in the television industry before landing his major role in Amphetamine.

Read Best Reviews of Amphetamine (2010) Here

Beautiful choreographed film.I'm a fan of "Scud" now! If you purchased this dvd a bonus special feature behind the scenes dvd is included.

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new twist on gay relationship, not your typical love story, very well presented, photography is excellent, very high marks for the leading actor , deserve an oscar nomination. do not miss it

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