Blue Sun Palace from writer/director Constance Tsang made its debut at Cannes in France, and tells the story of immigrant women working at a massage parlor in Queens, New York, where they cater to male clientele while also craving family connections while long from home.
Geoff Strasser (pictured), senior mixer and sound designer at Mr. Bronx (www.bronxaudio.com) in NYC, worked on the independent film's soundtrack, noting that the feature makes use of many long, single-shot scenes that pay homage to the Slow Cinema genre. Set in Queens, the film's characters speak Mandarin, with viewers witnessing their most intimate and vulnerable moments.
"The director, Constance Tsang, who I met at Sundance last year, tasked me to create a realistic backdrop for the cast’s compelling performances, and make sure their words were not only heard, but felt," Strasser explains. "I’ve lived in New York my whole life and have spent a fair amount of time in Flushing, eating in restaurants, shopping in the malls and singing in the sixth floor karaoke rooms. But the film’s story took me behind the closed doors that I’ve walked past millions of times, to peek in on the lives of the waitresses after they’ve clocked out for the night and the shopkeepers who have rolled down the metal gate."
According to Strasser, much of the film’s sonic ethos is about hearing those that the audience does not see - both literally and figuratively. I
"In the edit, Constance always wanted to know what the characters were doing off-screen," he recalls. "She wanted to be aware of whether roommates were watching TV or cleaning, or co-workers were chatting. We did just as much Foley for the off-screen characters as we did for the on-screen ones, if not more. We didn’t have any loop group on this film, so I had to get creative to create media for the world - whether it was a Korean soap opera the girls were watching or a local news report in Mandarin."
A lot of the stock sounds that Strasser might normally reach for are in English, and listeners would be able to tell by the pitches and cadences that they do not sound Chinese.
"To create a realistic soap opera, I ended up having ChatGPT write a script between two women, broke the script into two sets of lines for each character, used Google Translate to turn it into Mandarin, and then fed each set of lines into different voice generators," he explains. "I added some generic muzak and then futzed it in the box. The result was an extremely realistic looped TV show that played in the background of a massage parlor while the women there had a conversation."