Eternal Summer is a 2006 Taiwanese movie directed by Leste Chen. It’s available on Netflix. It has stellar performances from its trio of main characters. Watching it, I found myself immensely consoled by its depiction of sexual kindness. It’s portrayal of erotic compassion is all but absent from so many of the texts I currently encounter.

But if, after my poem’s sensual opening passage, you anticipate that for the Summer of the film’s title to be Eternal, its heat must be uninterrupted, you stand to be disappointed. This is no sizzler. Yet for me, the flashback past tense structure of the film effortlessly fulfils the timeless slow burn promise of its title. This with the effect that in my poem I can marvel at the kind, generous, tender and compassionate boys who grow up in the movie to feature precisely these qualities in their adult intimacy.

The extended metaphor of insect imagery in my poem takes its cue from the moth that flickers momentarily above the lovers as they embark on their sexual epiphany. Insects may be read as potentially unheimlich — creepy — castrative — however in my poem I recognize the film as conveying with this mysterious fluttering, a Matrixial Heimlich that, correctly understood, frees this exquisite scene of fear and unease. 

To find other work the Eternal Summer actors have done I scanned the internet. And then my poem could not avoid an unwilling realization of how much these young princes have aged. When youth is gone, (my poem had to ask), what becomes of sexual desire? And equally, I had to acknowledge how rare was the rich complexity of character, backstory and art direction to be found in the actors’ early work. Perhaps there are equivalently transcendent, later projects, in which they have appeared, but I did not find them. This disappointment led me to structure my poem in two parts — but the 1&2 of its title doesn’t only anticipate the more and better stories in which I wish these players, in their current maturity, could star.

It also indicates what I think of as the Matrixially premised pair bond vs outsider trope on which the film’s plot turns. The viewer is repeatedly able to evaluate which of the three friend-lovers can at any given moment be understood as an unknown other, who is nonetheless, in compassionate hospitality, more important to their mates than the self.

Which brings me to the supporting role of the boyfriends’ girlfriend. Her backstory is carefully signaled in the film, but she is still — and so predictably — ‘woman-as-object-of-exchange-between-men’. In my poem sequel I therefore ask exponentially more of her; and for her —from her male co-stars.

Her aside (hollow laugh), perhaps the most compelling aspect of the climactic sexual exchange in Eternal Summer, is a depiction of incrementally negotiated sexual consent. This exhilarating episode of dynamic give and take forms the initial part of my poem, but in the film’s narrative it is a late exchange, which draws on the characters’ detailed backstories to empathically recognize the ambiguities of power & control in play between the male leads at this key point.

Yet their eventual loving intimacy remains captive to the disturbing underlying premise that it is possible to be sexually aroused by an/other for whom one does not feel any sexual attraction. A paradox my poem, in its final implication of the lovers’ togetherness, has the luxury of dismissing. But were the film makers right to take out insurance against the persecution they may attract for their work’s advocacy of those consensual homoerotic relationships denied legitimacy in patriarchy?

Finally, in sharing this reflection on my poem, I affirm Eternal Summer’s inspirational denouement, which shifts the lovers’ private relationships out of the bedroom, into a naturally beautiful, if risky, public setting.

janet charman