In the opening frames of Cut Sleeve Boys, opening Friday, a gorgeous Anglo/Chinese man, Gavin Chan (Mark Hampton), employs the wrong recreational drug in a playful moment in a public toilet, then proceeds to give us a practical demonstration of Blondie's credo: "Die young, stay pretty." Just as we are recovering from Gavin's early exit — three minutes and 57 seconds, fade to black — we find ourselves in a London cemetery where a gaggle of mourners are experiencing rather different epiphanies.
A friend from Gavin's days at university, Melvyn Shu (Steven Lim), starts to heckle the priest presiding over the funeral, "Fag alert, fag alert," to the dismay of his camp humor-inclined friend, Ashley Wang (Chowee Leow). It turns out that Gavin, Melvyn and Ashley were college mates, partying their socks and bras off, with the cheeky home videos to prove it. But, following school, Gavin stayed closetbound and built a substantial computer business, while Mel and Ashley took the queen's road into retail.
Writer/director Ray Yeung means to have this "first gay British Chinese movie" be a fiercely comic comment on ethnic identity, sexual orientation and the possibility of second acts in queer life, but unfortunately he lacks the writing/directing chops and has created a major character who is basically a minor pain in the ass to friends, would-be lovers and, most sadly, to us.
Yeung is rather too proud of his Chinese muscle-boy, but Mel is from the get-go a shallow, vain, mean, aging pretty-boy. To top it off, Lim isn't old enough to convince us of Mel's desperate third-act dash to Botox city. Ultimately, Mel's act is as shopworn as the child's watch he tries to pass off to his country bumpkin boyfriend.
On the plus side, Chowee Leow is engaging as a campy queen who's about to trade hairpieces for wigs to become the woman the butch men he desires seem to require. There are touching moments where Ashley's affair with an ex-paratrooper starts to sizzle.
The late Billy Wilder boasted that his Berlin salad days were financed partly by moonlighting as a gigolo. Maybe that's why he was so good at imagining the cosmic joke that bedevils Norma Desmond and informs Joe E. Brown's curtain-closing quip, "Nobody's perfect." Cut Sleeve Boys tries to parade a Norma Desmond-sized ego without the emotional underpinning of exactly what transpires when a man becomes a mensch after donning a dress.