Constance Tsang’s first feature-length film Blue Sun Palace follows the lives of Chinese migrant workers in Queens, in the aftermath of tragedy in a massage parlour. Tsang mediates themes of exile and loneliness are mediated through a quiet, expertly cool direction. The film’s quietness is slow, tactful, and unassuming. You are punched in the gut before you know to look for the fist.

The movie’s world is full, lived-in. The camera primarily remains at a distance throughout the film, despite the film opening with an immediate and unrelenting hand-held close-up, following the intimate conversation between Didi (Haipeng Xu) and Cheung (Kang-sheng Lee). Nevertheless, Tsang positions the audience in corners, in nooks and crannies, peeking into the lively activity of the massage parlour behind curtains and at the end of hallways. The mise-en-scene is warm, each scene is detailed with delicate care: natural, gauzy light softens the edges of the frame, walls and bulbs emanate a dusty colour palette of yellow, pink, purple; clothes drape over the staircase; doors and walls are decorated with signs. When characters sit in a restaurant or dining table, Tsang composes the scene to include the kitchen, widening the lens of the camera and keeping the audience in constant awareness of the film’s broader environment. This attention to detail not only emphasises the film’s themes of location and belonging, but also shows Tsang’s deep care and love for capturing the scenery associated with the Chinese community in Queens.

The camera’s distance, while fostering a naturalistic and earnest mood to the film, also risks a lack of true attachment to the lives of the characters. Tsang does not spoon-feed us exposition; instead, plot-altering details are dropped casually, with only you, the viewer, finding them shocking. However, it is this very casualness, the utter believability of the film, which made me feel even more invested in the characters’ lives—I inhabited the thirsty, patient gaze of the voyeur, content to watch Amy (Ke-Xi Wu) try to fix a leak on the ceiling, or Cheung smoking outside the parlour. I fell in love with Tsang’s ability to weave such a profound narrative from fragments of ordinary scenes.

It is the film’s normalcy which makes its moments of tragedy all the more devastating and real. Just as joy and connection warms the film, so does grief engulf it. In a blink, Tsang transforms the film’s comfortable quietness into a paralysing, alienating force. Ke-Xi Wu’s performance, embodying Amy’s experience with grief and exploitation in her work as a masseuse is heartbreaking and genuine. Though, importantly, Tsang is careful to avoid the well-worn trauma narrative typical of immigrant stories in Western cinema, instead offering an alternative of hope, a sense of Amy finding strength in following her dreams despite her grief. The film’s ending is somber yet open, leaving us with the sense that the narrative and the characters’ lives exist beyond the constraints of the film. As the credits flickered on the screen, I found myself wanting to cling on, to stay with Amy and Cheung, in the warm, unrelenting embrace of Tsang’s vision.

BLUE SUN PALACE will screen as a part of the 72^nd edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival on the 9^th and 18^th of August.