See Ya

Yen Tan's Ciao wears arthouse pretense like a black armband.

by Shaun Brady

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Published: Jan 28, 2009

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Where most gay indies opt either for outrageous camp or explicit sexuality, Yen Tan's Ciao is almost perversely insistent on a morose stillness, downplaying every dramatic turn and repressing every emotion into a stubborn interiority. Depicting characters in mourning for a lost love, the film wears its arthouse pretensions like a black armband, though at 88 minutes it seems slower than an afternoon spent with Béla Tarr.

Tan sets up a fairly interesting love triangle, in that none of its sides exactly connect, and its apex is dead at the outset. After his best friend, Mark (played by Chuck Blaum, mostly in photos and videos), is killed in a car accident, Jeff (Adam Neal Smith) sifts through his e-mail, discovering a voluminous correspondence with an Italian man planning on paying his first visit that very weekend. At Jeff's invitation, Andrea (Alessandro Calza, who also co-wrote the script with Tan) makes the trip to Dallas anyway, and the two men become acquainted through remembrances of Mark — to one of them, he's an online lover never met in the flesh; to the other, a longtime friend and unrequited love.

The story's ambitions are modest — unfortunately, the same can't be said for the director, who continually intrudes with interminably held shots and music-video interludes. For all their talk of sightseeing and traveling, the characters don't get outside much, held back more by budget restrictions than by mourning.

Where Tan succeeds is in the awkward intimacy of these two men as they share banalities, getting to know each other while remaining guarded about the unspoken dynamics in the relationship. There's a jealousy in Jeff's gazes at Andrea, trying to determine why Mark found something at a remove of distance and indirect communication that he couldn't find directly in front of him. And Andrea is all dashed hopes, obviously having dreamed of making some kind of life here that now seems impossible.

Revelations are doled out slowly over the course of Jeff and Andrea's conversations, but when Tan switches gears it's to decelerate — the opening sequence of e-mail being typed may be the most dynamic shots in the entire film. Watching at home, I had to check more than once that the DVD hadn't frozen up while the camera lingered on Smith gazing despondently at nothing. Not much is gleaned from each of these moments — yup, he's still sad — especially when the resolution is so clear from the outset. This isn't the type of film for happy endings, just cathartic, slightly ambiguous, hopeful ones. Which amounts pretty much to the same thing.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

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