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Review

Bernardo Chow plays Wei Ming, a young Chinese filmmaker living in New York City with his older, white (also Jewish) boyfriend, who goes back to Hong Kong to make a documentary about a Disneyland that is being built there. His female internet chat buddy Mimi, (Cherie Ho), works in a shop in Hong Kong, where she is visited one day by a long-haired Chinese dancer, Larry (Victor Ma), who she is instantly attracted to. Larry, a solo interpretive dancer, has his own issues... not the least of which is visiting the saunas, where (like bathhouses here) he finds indiscriminate sex in the arms of men he doesn't know – and doesn't wish to know, as the phone number he gives to those who ask for it is a fake.

When Larry confesses his homosexuality – and sauna visits – to Mimi, the girl gets very upset, acting almost betrayed; even though the two never dated, her attraction to Larry was quite obvious, and to learn they can only be friends is not what the girl wants to hear. Larry, meanwhile, runs across Wei Ming on the late-night streets of Hong Kong, and – after boldly hitting on him -- takes Wei to the saunas for a little one-on-one sex that leaves Larry infatuated with the guy to the point of giving him his real cellphone number. Wei skips out, however, before Larry can even properly say goodbye.

For the first time, Larry is beside himself; with every ring of the cell, he is hoping for Wei to call. Also, he makes mysterious trips to a large, elegant home, where he secretly watches a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, sadness clouding his face. His preoccupation with Wei even interrupts rehearsal for his latest performance. Meanwhile, Mimi and Wei finally hook up in person, after chatting for so long online, and form a friendship that is nearly destroyed when they run across Larry, and it becomes obvious that Mimi was also thinking of Wei in romantic terms – when she introduces the two and Wei immediately begins giving excuses of why he hasn't called Larry, Mimi freaks again, in utter disbelief that she has hooked up with yet another "gay guy" that she was beginning to have feelings for! As the two men beg to keep Mimi's friendship, they also develop a love affair that makes Larry fall deeper and deeper for Wei Ming, even as Wei has his own questions that take the three of them to Macau for a visit to his father in a nursing home. Wei is worried his father, a former gold welder, may have had ties to the Nazis during World War II, and sets out to find some answers, even as he continues his documentary on the Disneyfication of Hong Kong.

Mimi, with these two men to finally open up to in her life, reveals one evening – in a nicely-filmed scene – what happened to her while she was living in Belgrade the summer before. As the date for Wei's return to America gets closer and closer, the three friends grow, find love and friendship, and begin a road to exorcising past ghosts that, hopefully, will allow them to move on with their lives.

The Map of Sex and Love is not a film for everyone. It's very poetic in nature, very "Asian" in tone – symbolic, and full of metaphors about life in general and being gay in particular. The three leads – Chow in particular – give good, believable performances, though the film itself starts off slow and doesn't really pick up too much until the three main characters' lives begin to interact. Director Evans Chan, who also wrote the script, delivers a story of love and healing, on a low budget but still with effective results. If you are seeking titillation – the sight of handsome Asian men running around nude or explicit love scenes – there is some nudity here but it's minimal, despite the provocative cover (that's a shirtless Chow on the box, and he is quite cute). This film, though, is more an intimate study of the baggage we as humans (and as gay men) carry, and how best we can unpack them. Or, as one character says: "You don't have to know much in order to forgive – but you'd better know a lot before you condemn." Words meant for us to apply to ourselves as much as to each other. (Mandarin with English subtitles).

 -- Donna Scott