Loneliness, solidarity, and the longing for someone to bond with dominate this deeply affecting film that can be a disorienting experience at first. Not only is the dominant language in the film Mandarin, the visual language is also distinctly East Asian.
Tony Lee and Didi Haipeng Xu are on the brink of a relationship. When after a night of dinner and karaoke he misses his bus, she says he can stay with her. Though she denies it the next morning, her roommate and co-worker Amy Wu Ke-Xi still wants all the gossip on the mysterious man Didi snuck into her room. The women work in a massage parlor, but Didi sees a future in Baltimore and in the restaurant business for her and her culinary-gifted friend. That dream is cut short by a violent hold-up after closing hours, an event that sends Amy into a spiral of depression.
Tentatively Tony comes into her life, providing both of them an opportunity to work through their grief and to have someone to connect to. But is grief and the need for human contact, and something that resembles family, enough to build a lasting connection?
The characters in Blue Sun Palace are in limbo, as if with one leg in an insecure future but with the other still in the past. Faye Wong is the artist of choice when singing karaoke, and food plays an important and recurring role as a gateway into memories. More tangible connections to the past are brittle: Tony has strained and loveless video conversations with his wife back in Taiwan, which he had to flee because of a crippling gambling debt.
Everybody holds on to their old world because the new world is harsh and unforgiving, but there is no going back, only forward. Solidarity and a shared experience are all they have, and that is little to go on.
