Review of Night Scene

Night Scene is an apparently low budget documentary from China about “rent boys” in Beijing.  English speaking audiences are likely to find the sub-titles to be infuriating as the translation is lazy.  Long discourses are shortened to a sentence or two of summary.  I suspect an immense amount of important text is lost.

One striking feature of the young men in this film compared to other hustler documentaries or dramatic narrative films is that very few of the rent boys seem to have had their self-esteem damaged by what many others seem to consider their degrading work.  Even the self-described heterosexuals for the most part do not seem distressed by the way they put food on their tables.

There appears to be a lot of social support of these guys for each other.  Perhaps that explains why only a few of them are characterized by self-hate.  Drug use appears to be low, as well.

I don’t recommend this film to anyone who does not understand Chinese dialects until or unless the sub-titles have been improved.

Genre: Gay themed documentary

Director:  Zi’en Cui

Language: English sub-titles

Availability: DVD and Instant Streaming

99Gay-Men.us Rating: **

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