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Love Against the Grain

A run of films where desire refuses the shape its world demands — opera stages, drought-struck Taipei, an honor-bound Lahore household, drenched Buenos Aires — and burns brighter, and more dangerously, for the refusal.

Festival and film-school canon more than crowd favorites: mostly demanding art cinema and several genuinely devastating, so save them for a patient, steady mood — with the tender, accessible Saving Face as the one easy way in.

  • Farewell My Concubine (1993)
  • Happy Together (1997)
  • Fallen Angels (1995)
  • Saving Face (2004)
  • Joyland (2022)
  • The Wayward Cloud (2005)
  • The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
  • The Taste of Things (2023)
  • Queen Margot (1994)
  • Medea (1969)
  • The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
  • The Wedding Banquet (1993) — The Ang Lee sham-marriage comedy you forgot you'd saved — the same queer-son-versus-Taipei-parents bind that drives Saving Face and Joyland, only played tender.
  • Lust, Caution (2007) — If Farewell My Concubine's dangerous devotion stayed with you, this is the under-seen Ang Lee where desire quietly dissolves an assassin's resolve in occupied Shanghai.
  • Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) — The three-hour Palme d'Or you kept meaning to sit with — first love as raw, consuming and self-shattering as Happy Together.
  • Head-On (2004) — The overlooked Fatih Akin where a marriage of convenience detonates into real amour fou — The Lovers on the Bridge's self-destruction relocated to Hamburg's honor-bound Turkish community.
  • In the Mood for Love (2000) — The Wong Kar-wai masterwork of desire held just out of reach that pairs inevitably with Happy Together and Fallen Angels — if it's somehow still unwatched on your list, now.
  • Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) — The under-seen Hong Kong immigrant romance where love keeps missing its moment across a decade — the aching patience beneath In the Mood for Love's restraint.
  • Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) — The Ang Lee Taipei banquet where a father's fading palate and three daughters' hidden desires simmer — Saving Face's family table meets The Taste of Things' kitchen.
  • Laurence Anyways (2012) — The Dolan epic you shelved — a love that refuses to end when one partner transitions, desire against the world's demanded shape as fierce as Joyland's.
  • Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — The other Fassbinder to set beside Petra von Kant — an older widow and a young Moroccan migrant loving straight into a wall of social contempt.
  • Days of Being Wild (1990) — The early Wong Kar-wai drifter reverie that seeds Happy Together and Fallen Angels — longing as restlessness, the one to finally backfill.
  • Cold War (2018) — The monochrome romance doomed across the Iron Curtain — amour fou that can't survive its own history, in the devastating register of The Lovers on the Bridge.