This Vietnamese show isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it definitely keeps you hooked. It’s a quick watch with 10 episodes that only last about 15 to 20 minutes each, and even though it uses all the usual BL tropes, it really works because you can't help but root for the underdog. The romance actually takes its time to show up and then wraps up pretty fast, but the characters still feel way more relatable than in a lot of other shows like this. The story follows Phuc, who moves from Hanoi to Saigon to open his dream bar and live with his girlfriend. Things go sideways immediately when he arrives a day early to surprise her and catches her cheating, so he breaks up with her and leaves. He ends up reaching out to his old childhood neighbors, Cong and his sister Han, who he hasn't seen in years. The siblings are struggling on their own with a massive debt and Han’s poor health. Han thinks her brother works at a convenience store, but Cong is actually a heavy for a criminal gro...
Trust me, the premise of the film, as I mentioned above, is just that. A group of friends talking about random things for a good 110 minutes, which are neither juicy, exciting or anything that I would care about. Every aspect of stereotypical gay literature is shown here. There is a confused married man, a new kid on the block from Nebraska, a self hating hustler, a mother drowning her son for being gay, a straight guy in a gay bar by mistake.
Being shot in a real location, the production lacks fitness. The lighting is dark and shadowy and at certain points even out-of-focus making it all seem quite amateurish. But if you forget that for a while, the direction lacks style. The film has no momentum at all. Half of the time I found myself confused between various patrons of the bar. There are multiple groups or one-on-one conversations happening in the bar, and the camera just cuts from one conversation to the other. The two stories that could have been interesting are just not explored enough. A young feminine man, for whom a straight guy has fallen, beats him up after realizing that he is a man could have made for a film in itself. The characters seemed full pf themselves, and as an audience I kept wondering that is it just a bad film or is it someone's idea of self indulgence hoping to create a masterpiece. (2/10)
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