East Palace, West Palace.

* Written by Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiabo * Directed by Mang Yuan * Starring Si Han and Hu Jun * Released by Strand

The scene is a park. The camera floats slowly over the dense foliage and cloistered men's room that signal prime gay cruising territory. Inside the loo a young man steps away from the urinals. A police officer washing his hands eyes the man suspiciously, then moves in for the kill.

Welcome to Los Angeles, right? Try Beijing.

In East Palace, West Palace, director Mang Yuan depicts a culture where gay men are routinely harassed by enforcers of a legal system that does not specifically forbid homosexuality. In lieu of being jail, the men are hunted down in the parks, rounded up, humiliated, and beaten. When it comes to fear and loathing, east is west and west is east and ever the twain shall meet.

Homophobia, is the international language that brings Zhang's two antagonists together. A-Lan (Si Han) is demure and willowy but toughened against the rigors of looking for love al fresco. One evening the young magazine writer is snared in a police swoop, and he attracts the attention of a police officer who has never seen him before. As played by Hu Jun, a seductive actor with a wavy Dana Andrews crop of hair, the officer swaggers over his prey with a God's-gift-to-women smugness that indicates to the smitten A-Lan that perhaps this cop doth protest too much.

The police officer hauls A-Lan back to his quarters for interrogation, unwittingly fulfilling the first of the young man's fantasies. Detecting the possibilities in the officer's probing eyes, A-Lan proceeds to tempt his captor with graphic recollections of his own queer history. It is confessional as come-on: Tales of sexual conquest and fag bashing alike overflow with a sadomasochistic intensity that betray the teller's romantic yearnings for his listener.

The lure of Zhang and cowriter Wang Xiabo's stagy setup is in seeing how, if at all, A-Lan's anecdotal striptease will pay off. The delicious dynamic between the two men is reflective of A-Lan's magazine stories, in which he calculatedly reverses male and female roles. While the officer tries to dominate using the posturings of control with which he is invested, A-Lan keeps wresting that power away with the muscle of perceptiveness and emotional honesty.

There is a predictability to this little tango: When the cop melts for a moment, passing his cigarette to his capture in a spontaneous gesture of sympathy, you just know he's going to grab it back a second later, repelled that A-Lan is relishing the gift too much. It's that kind of movie. It comes as no surprise that East Palace, West Palace has been adapted for the stage after the example of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which it often evokes.

If the film feels like a play in celluloid clothing, then what a wardrobe its director has fashioned for it! Zhang is a painterly filmmaker, framing his characters in dreamy compositions of architecture and nature so sensuous you can smell them: The lush park cruising grounds are as humidly fragrant as the men's room is dank and rank. He implicates the audience in the policeman's voyeurism by stalking A-Lan from behind and mediating his presence through windows, mirrors, opaque screens, and mosquito nets.

The actors, apparently tickled to be fed so much rich psychosexual subtext, go at their roles like starved dogs. There is a smirky, over-the-top quality to Si Han's emoting as A-Lan that pushes some scenes to the other side of camp; when slapped by the officer, he bares his teeth with a '40s screen-diva defiance that made me chuckle. Hu Jun, listening intently as the officer, turns in a performance of superbly gradated reactions that telegraph exactly what's going on inside. He's also sexy as hell. Officer, would you mind showing me how those handcuffs work?

Stuart is a theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.