FILM | SHE, A CHINESE | DIRECTOR | GUO XIALOU
BFI 53rd London Film Festival
Guo Xiaolu’s She, a Chinese (2009)
BFI 53rd London Film Festival
Guo Xiaolu’s She, a Chinese (2009)
It’s that time of year again when the London Film Festival winds down and I anticipate the forthcoming Korean Film Festival, held as usual at the Barbican Centre but supported this year by a special Bong Joon-ho retrospective in the BFI Southbank. Among the highlights are a Director’s Cut of Park Chan-wook’s blockbuster Thirst which will be introduced by the director himself; Scandal Makers, the new film from Kang Hyung-chul about a celebrity radio show host who is hit by a “comic” paternity scandal; and a tantalising new film from Kim Ki-duk entitled Dream. In the meantime, I want to post briefly on last night’s film at the L.F.F., She, A Chinese, the first feature-length drama from prolific Chinese author and poet Guo Xiaolu (key text: “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers”).
The film plays in two parts (a smalltown life in rural China; a cosmopolitan one in London) and Guo structures events in novella form, incorporating whimsical intertitles to comment on her central character’s predicament. Li Mei (Huang Lu) is a Chinese peasant girl who lives in a village somewhere outside of Chongqing; she scrapes together an existence barely above the poverty line, performing menial tasks for her dismissive mother and oversees a local stall for pool-playing layabouts who ritually ignore her as a growing and desirable woman. An apparently remote but anxious girl, Mei dismisses her mother’s undignified (but still honest) work by taking off with a petty gangster, but when she refuses him sex she winds up in the arms of another admirer, a local truck driver, who unceremoniously rapes her. Mei moves from one sexual encounter to another and over the course of the film arrives finally in London where she encounters the same asphyxiating isolation that stifled her back home — but here, men are attracted by her exoticism. The spectre of Orientalism is writ large; more troublingly, I felt, the protagonist takes advantage of her exoticism in the hope of settling her life.
The film plays in two parts (a smalltown life in rural China; a cosmopolitan one in London) and Guo structures events in novella form, incorporating whimsical intertitles to comment on her central character’s predicament. Li Mei (Huang Lu) is a Chinese peasant girl who lives in a village somewhere outside of Chongqing; she scrapes together an existence barely above the poverty line, performing menial tasks for her dismissive mother and oversees a local stall for pool-playing layabouts who ritually ignore her as a growing and desirable woman. An apparently remote but anxious girl, Mei dismisses her mother’s undignified (but still honest) work by taking off with a petty gangster, but when she refuses him sex she winds up in the arms of another admirer, a local truck driver, who unceremoniously rapes her. Mei moves from one sexual encounter to another and over the course of the film arrives finally in London where she encounters the same asphyxiating isolation that stifled her back home — but here, men are attracted by her exoticism. The spectre of Orientalism is writ large; more troublingly, I felt, the protagonist takes advantage of her exoticism in the hope of settling her life.
Li Mei (Lu Huang) in She, a Chinese (2009)
I have problems with the film but I also want to defend it. On the first matter: narrative. In her director’s statement Guo says “it is crucial to show the process of leaving, the inner journey she is going through, a person taking risks, discovering herself and at the same time paying a high price.” Which is fine, except that some of the crucial acts of “discovery” and “risk” that Mei takes (setting in motion her flight from China) are withheld from the viewer. Scenes in which Mei exchanges (hitman) Spikey’s money for foreign currency (for the first time), or the presumably unfamiliar experience of booking her first plane ticket (notwithstanding the fact it is part of a guided tour package), are absent here. Similarly, we never see Mei take Spikey’s money from the mattress (the act is inferred), yet it is the riskiest transgression she will ever make in her adult life (she is stealing mob money). Other omissions include: Mei’s seduction of the grumpy senior citizen, Mr Hunt (Geoffrey Hutchings), which somehow leads to their marriage of convenience; her best friend was evidently instrumental in helping her to leave her village for Chongqing, but she barely registers in the first act; and presumably Mei’s G.P. arranged for her first antenatal visit and the ultrasound scan, although how I’m not sure.
In the post-screening Q & A someone asked simply if the director liked the film’s protagonist. Frustratingly (deliberately or otherwise), the question was lost and no answer forthcoming, but it raised an important issue about the film’s autobiographical status, and of Guo’s connection with a girl who may or may not be a film-idea of her self. It’s clear we aren’t meant to “like” her (in the Hollywood sense, she is not a “transparent” figure of classical narrative), but we are meant to feel something because she is “enigmatic,” “risky”; she is also sullen, wan, and seductive. Then there is the question of whether or not she is deliberately using her lovers to stabilise her own emotions. On that note, Guo has said that Mei is something of a “tease”, that she is not a “victim,” and that her lust for everything ranging from the close personal intimacy of relationships and the passion of fucking (which the director equates with a swollen appetite for food) to the environment itself and the aural sensation of living in a vibrant, otherworldly city guides her through life. I think the film’s success therefore hinges on the authenticity of her emotions and her lust for new sexual partners; I also think that our identification with the joy, passion, disappointments and failure of her experiences is paramount: perhaps we are meant to see ourselves in the protagonist?
Two points, then: I don’t personally buy Guo’s claim that Mei is a tease (this admission sounds polemical); her character is partly redeemed by the fact that her lovers mistreat her: Rachid (Chris Ryman), an Indian Muslim, abandons her once she is pregnant; a petty gangster (Wu Leiming), likewise, when she rejects his advances; and was it not simply a matter of time before her relationship with the nameless hitman (Wei Yibo) was soured by infidelity and physical abuse? Secondly, some critics have pulled up the film for being a series of episodic sketches which the director uses to frustrate our “desire to understand” — see Daniel Trilling’s ‘LFF #4: She, a Chinese’ in New Statesman, Dan Fainaru’s review in Screen Daily, Ray Bennett’s review for The Hollywood Reporter, and Dereck Elley’s ‘She, a Chinese’ in Variety. I don’t have a problem with Guo’s approach because this is an arthouse production. (I hesitate to draw on the term “vignettes,” because I feel like I’m trading on language personalised by an old friend, but the term nevertheless infers a mode of thinking, a means of private expression, that I think characterises the film well. She, A Chinese is a life in vignettes; it is a life of vignettes also.)
As I’ve said, it feels like a mature, if also temperamental, piece of filmmaking that isn’t without some genuinely uncomfortable (for being so authentic) emotions — such emotions will speak to anyone who has moved on perhaps prematurely from a lover to prevent a situation from deteriorating further, or who watched from afar as somebody close to them moved from relationship to relationship with apparently little heartache, only to ultimately prosper. They are, perhaps, the “survivors” of our kind.
In the post-screening Q & A someone asked simply if the director liked the film’s protagonist. Frustratingly (deliberately or otherwise), the question was lost and no answer forthcoming, but it raised an important issue about the film’s autobiographical status, and of Guo’s connection with a girl who may or may not be a film-idea of her self. It’s clear we aren’t meant to “like” her (in the Hollywood sense, she is not a “transparent” figure of classical narrative), but we are meant to feel something because she is “enigmatic,” “risky”; she is also sullen, wan, and seductive. Then there is the question of whether or not she is deliberately using her lovers to stabilise her own emotions. On that note, Guo has said that Mei is something of a “tease”, that she is not a “victim,” and that her lust for everything ranging from the close personal intimacy of relationships and the passion of fucking (which the director equates with a swollen appetite for food) to the environment itself and the aural sensation of living in a vibrant, otherworldly city guides her through life. I think the film’s success therefore hinges on the authenticity of her emotions and her lust for new sexual partners; I also think that our identification with the joy, passion, disappointments and failure of her experiences is paramount: perhaps we are meant to see ourselves in the protagonist?
Two points, then: I don’t personally buy Guo’s claim that Mei is a tease (this admission sounds polemical); her character is partly redeemed by the fact that her lovers mistreat her: Rachid (Chris Ryman), an Indian Muslim, abandons her once she is pregnant; a petty gangster (Wu Leiming), likewise, when she rejects his advances; and was it not simply a matter of time before her relationship with the nameless hitman (Wei Yibo) was soured by infidelity and physical abuse? Secondly, some critics have pulled up the film for being a series of episodic sketches which the director uses to frustrate our “desire to understand” — see Daniel Trilling’s ‘LFF #4: She, a Chinese’ in New Statesman, Dan Fainaru’s review in Screen Daily, Ray Bennett’s review for The Hollywood Reporter, and Dereck Elley’s ‘She, a Chinese’ in Variety. I don’t have a problem with Guo’s approach because this is an arthouse production. (I hesitate to draw on the term “vignettes,” because I feel like I’m trading on language personalised by an old friend, but the term nevertheless infers a mode of thinking, a means of private expression, that I think characterises the film well. She, A Chinese is a life in vignettes; it is a life of vignettes also.)
As I’ve said, it feels like a mature, if also temperamental, piece of filmmaking that isn’t without some genuinely uncomfortable (for being so authentic) emotions — such emotions will speak to anyone who has moved on perhaps prematurely from a lover to prevent a situation from deteriorating further, or who watched from afar as somebody close to them moved from relationship to relationship with apparently little heartache, only to ultimately prosper. They are, perhaps, the “survivors” of our kind.
29 October, 2009
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