Lan Yu is the name of a young architecture student (Liu Ye) who, in need of money, ends up in the bed of a successful Beijing businessman, Chen Handong (played by prominent stage actor Hu Jun). The boy falls in love with the man, who wants anything but an emotional entanglement. A master of one-upmanship, Chen staves off Lan Yu’s affections with more and more expensive gifts–and even, briefly, marries, installing the boy as his lover in a villa he buys for him–only gradually coming to acknowledge, as the years pass, that he can’t live without him. It’s a wise, moving love story–marred only by a rather arbitrary twist of fate at the end–played out with an emotional honesty that would be unusual and adventurous in any language.
