Pride Month: Your Name Engraved Herein

As we reached my final weekly Pride Month viewing for 2024, I had narrowed down my choices to two movies featuring gay men, which was the idea after two previous movies about lesbians and one previous movie about gay men. And as you remember, in addition to choosing to watch four movies I had never heard of prior to this month, I also had an informal international theme brewing, having previously watched movies set in Australia, Italy and South Africa. 

The options were The Boys in the Band, set in America, and Your Name Engraved Herein, set in Taiwan. Both movies are from 2020. 

Having had a long day in the office on Wednesday, I was initially inclined to watch The Boys in the Band, preventing myself from having to read subtitles. However, part of me wondered if this choice was in the spirit of the new discoveries theme. The movie is produced by Ryan Murphy and has such familiar stars as Zachary Quinto, Jim Parsons and Matt Bomer, though I couldn't be sure if I'd actually heard of it before. The title sounded familiar, but I could have just been confusing it with last year's George Clooney movie The Boys in the Boat, which I have not yet seen. Then there was also the idea that the informal international theme is stronger for a movie set in Taiwan than a movie set in America. 

With positives and negatives for both choices, I decided just to go with the shorter movie. And Your Name Engraved Herein was seven minutes shorter, 114 vs. 121. (Both of which were actually too long for a Wednesday in which I was so tired that I'd slept through my train stop coming home, only to do some sawing of fence panels and a trip to the grocery store after I got home.)

First I had to find the movie, having remembered its premise more than its title. A whole trip through my Netflix queue (I'm only watching Netflix movies this Pride Month) did not reveal it, so I had to search the LGBTQ filter and then it popped right up.

Kuang-Hui Liu's film focuses on two teenage boys with feelings for each other just after the 1987 lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Just because government oppressiveness has been diminished, though, doesn't mean society is just going to start throwing its arms around homosexuals. So as it was for people in all parts of the world in 1987, the boys are forced to hide their feelings and even to question whether they can be cured of these "unnatural" desires. Making matters more complicated, the boys attend a Catholic school where they are repeatedly told these desires are sinful, though they receive council from a Canadian priest who may have also had, may still have, these desires.

Your Name Engraved Herein was the least successful for me of the four movies I watched for Pride Month, but only by a slim margin, as it stuck the landing after some rough middle patches. Without spoiling anything for a movie you're not likely to see anyway, I'll say the ending had a little bit of a Past Lives vibe, and not just because the characters are Asian. (Though again not trying to spoil too much, there's a part where one character says he "never saw [the other] again," which ended up being disproven by the story.)

The thing that kind of bothered me was the inconsistent characterization of the two leads. Chang Jia-han, played by Edward Chen, is effectively the main character, a buttoned-up type who plays horns in the school band and is essentially a model student. His on-and-off paramour/best friend, nicknamed Birdy because he's the crazy one of the pair (based on the movie Birdy apparently), is the one who challenges norms and behaves in an openly eccentric manner, not appearing to care what others think of him. He's also the one who receives most of the assumptions by his classmates that he's queer.

Yet the two seem to switch roles from time to time about which one wants to hide his true nature and which one is more scared about being identified, and there are parts where I thought one was just inexplicably mean to the other for no reason I could identify in the script. Now, I did wonder if I'd missed a crucial line of dialogue at one point, due to being sleepy (and needing to nap a couple times during the movie), which would better contextualize this. But I ultimately decided I hadn't and it was just a case of inconsistency in the script. Some of Birdy's behavior ultimately gets an explanation as the movie goes on, but it still left me unsatisfied during key dramatic turns.

I would say also the movie did not contain many surprises in terms of its consideration of this subject matter, though that needn't be a prerequisite for this sort of movie, as depiction is often enough -- especially in a part of the world with significantly retrograde views on homosexuality specifically, and being different generally. A lot of the narrative beats seemed familiar to me, and I didn't ache for these characters the way I should have, in part due to some deficits in the hurried way their relationship is initially established, and in part due to Birdy's mercurial nature, whether that was a failing in the writing or an intentional choice.

I did get there in the end, though, and I found the last shot of the film particularly effective. It left me with a wistful feeling about how far the world has come since 1987 but how far it still has to go, and that seems like a good note on which to end things for the month.

I'm already starting to think of viewing themes for June 2025 as I continue to make this an annual tradition. And though I probably won't fit it in before the end of June, I'm looking forward to watching a new release for Pride Month on Netflix, which is the documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, about the history of LGBTQI+ stand-up comedy.