The Love Songs of Tiedan

Hao Jie's second feature suffers the fate of a typical art-house film, which means sinking at the box office without even a ripple. His debut film Single Men (2010) was a breakout garnering a basket of international awards but never attempted to gain approval for domestic release. As such, it did not need to remove the naughty edges that might have rankled the censors.

In both movies, Hao displays the curiosity of a teenage boy who is just discovering the wonders of sex. Tiedan is an adolescent who falls for a much older neighbor and, years later, her daughters. The story is very fluent and full of bawdy humor, yet it lacks the small details that make Single Men so refreshing. There is no ideology in either movie, but someone growing out of puberty is not really a subject everyone is comfortable with, and the story is hard to tell well under the circumstances.

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