Blue Sun Palace, Constance Tsang’s feature length debut, opens by showing what it’s like in a massage parlor. Running the respectable establishment are Chinese female immigrants living in Queens, New York, unaware of what’s to come. Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), one of the employees, watches helplessly after an intruder murders her best friend Didi (Xu Haipeng). The tragedy, though, brings Amy close to Didi’s boyfriend Cheung (Lee Kang-sheng), realizing things they have in common. This relationship helps Amy heal, but of course working at the parlor might send her to the edge again.

Blue Sun Palace frames its characters through observational camerawork, capturing lives that do seem mundane at the surface. Repetition, though, brings variation especially as the context keeps changing for characters living lives that have vulnerabilities. The other employees putting away shampoo bottles pre tragedy is gonna look different to Amy mopping the floor afterwards. The other employees – they all live together – telling her it’s 3AM is the additional kicker in that scene. This movie has the right smidges of gallows humour to reinforce just how much tragedy changes people.

This movie tells its story through images of unvarnished beauty, with details sneaking up to its patient viewers. Obviously the dialogue with its impressionistic touches reminds us of the old adage of doing more with less. And in fairness, Blue Sun Palace is a movie where people eat a lot and I really like that. Characters, despite living in America, speak in Mandarin mostly, and we get to examine the spaces they inhabit. It has its share of open doors, its characters uncaring, letting each other see some certain private spaces.

Stories like Blue Sun Palace, ones about racialized working class women, have some tendencies that it mostly avoids. Amy and the other women work and live in a parlor but not the kind of parlor viewers mostly assume. They live together by choice, although there’s a smidge of them settling, which is part of the immigrant experience. Amy is ‘fine’ doing most of the cleaning because the other women are not as sad about Didi. I am also of two minds about the violent incident that comes before the end of the second act.

My other note about Blue Sun Palace is how it doesn’t want lasting happy moments but that’s life. And even if those happy moments don’t last, they’re satisfying when they blaze on screen for the viewers. Sure, we find out that Amy didn’t start her own restaurant but her working in one felt kinda good. Raising the gate as the sunlight slowly hits the restaurant and Amy’s silhouette makes sense here. Also, Amy leaving Queens after sabotaging her relationship is sad, but the sun rises in its own way.

Blue Sun Palace is available to stream on MUBI, unless-