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Simplicity can prove as enigmatic as complexity. The new Chinese film “This Woman” (which opens Friday at Metrograph), the first feature by Alan Zhang, offers a straightforward story that’s made intricate not by what it shows but by what it withholds. It’s a classic melodrama of romantic entanglements and family complications, threats and evasions, the stressful intersections of love and money. But what Zhang, an artist and feminist activist, does with her story transforms it into a work of calmly bold modernism. As the title suggests, the movie is centered on an individual, but Zhang elides many of the salient elements of that character’s psychology. The resulting portrait, though finely detailed, is gappy, leaving openings through which the currents of life pour in. Far from being merely a view of one woman, Zhang’s movie, however intimate in its dimensions, provides a wide-ranging vision of Chinese society at large.
The protagonist, Beibei (played by Hihi Lee, who co-wrote the script with Zhang), is a middle-class striver in Beijing. She lives with her husband and their three-year-old daughter, and works in real-estate sales. She is also having a brazen affair with one man (even travelling out of town with him) while maintaining an emotionally intense but apparently platonic relationship with a male colleague. Yet Beibei doesn’t plan to divorce, and says that her husband has no right to complain, having also cheated. Meanwhile, the child is being cared for primarily by Beibei’s widowed mother, whom Beibei blames and resents for pushing her into marriage and motherhood.
Zhang finds Beibei in constant turmoil and constant search for romantic adventure. A breakup talk with one partner transforms a riverside idyll into a melancholy dialectical joust. In a park, Beibei takes a call on her phone and is heard stressfully defending herself against apparently wild accusations from her work friend’s wife. Later, a dinner with friends (presented almost entirely in closeups of Beibei) is set a-jangle with her account of that phone call—involving the aggrieved wife’s frightening threats and the colleague’s coerced yet false confessions.
Meanwhile, Beibei is struggling for money. She quits her job and gets involved in property-flipping, buying and renovating an apartment to rent out, while also trying to fulfill a long-standing promise (and, as she sees it, duty) to buy her mother a flat in their home town. This takes money that Beibei doesn’t have. She has already borrowed from her mother (a thirty-year loan, repayable monthly, at a high interest rate) and, with her back against the wall, turns to a lover for another loan. (Her mother asserts that, if he turns her down, he’s a useless man.) Zhang revels in intricate practicalities: a contract-signing in an official bureau, a negotiation with a rental client. Romance and business go hand in hand as Beibei goes from city to city and encounters different men—even joining one in co-running a bar, where she connects with another, who shows up dashingly on a motorcycle.
The tension increases with the coming of the covid-19 pandemic. Masks are worn in public, announcements are heard requiring negative test results to enter a train station, and Beibei’s maternal grandmother finds herself in total lockdown, her neighborhood barred to visitors altogether. Beibei’s frenzied existence, with its romantic and financial complications, is also underpinned by grief and melancholy: the family is still mourning Beibei’s late father (she makes a wistful trip to the cemetery) and, when she visits her grandmother, now in a nursing home, the elderly woman doesn’t recognize her.
Zhang films the turbulent yet nuanced action in dry, restrained tableaux of an elusive lyricism, a poetry that, to match Beibei’s relentless pursuits, remains just out of reach. The plain, pensive framings are shot through with vectors of power both official and unofficial: pandemic regulations and the administrative tangles around real estate impose one kind of stricture; tradition and ingrained mores provide another. Family bonds come off less as affinities of love and compassion than as another kind of contract, a set of onerous obligations. Even a simple online purchase, thanks to an informational thicket of identification checks and to gamelike time pressure, seems to threaten entrapment. Simple street scenes display the implications of architecture and urbanism. Built-up, faux-utopian modern cities look like Disneylands of manicured vistas and bright surfaces, bringing to mind open-air panopticons. Chaotic warrens in rundown backwaters, such as the desolate apartment complex where Beibei’s grandmother used to live, suggest neglect that’s far from benign.
The action is punctuated by on-camera interviews with Beibei, as if this fictional character were a real person discussing the action retrospectively. (Ultimately, the fictional façade breaks down, as the actress speaks of the movie’s implications for her real life, and Zhang, heard off camera, reveals that some of her own experiences underlie the film.) Though there is a playfulness to this element of faux documentary, it also highlights the fact that even the film’s dramatic scenes, meticulously observed yet blankly inhabited, have a documentary feel. Beibei’s self-aware self-analysis, discussing her quest for love, her indifference to sex, her remote marriage, her inadequacy and discontent as a mother, appear less as the expression of her character than the imprint of her environment. Zhang does more than just hint at this notion; she trumpets it at the start, opening with an interview scene in which Beibei declares that she’s merely “a typical wife and mother” whose life is “strictly based on societal expectations for women.”
Zhang’s title, ironically framing her broadly sociological story as a narrowly individual portrait, reminds me of the brouhaha over Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film “A Married Woman.” That drama of adultery originally bore the title “The Married Woman,” but censors forced Godard to change it, lest the film appear to assert that the typical French wife is adulterous. Zhang, with her title, heads trouble off before it arrives—yet she has trouble of another kind. She made the film independently, skirting official censorship and thus making it ineligible for a commercial release in China. It nonetheless became a succès d’estime, winning prizes at festivals there and internationally. (It’s worth noting that, though American independent films face no censorship, many of them likewise win acclaim at festivals but are undistributed or only scantly released.) “This Woman,” with its sense of artistic freedom matched by its drama of struggles for personal freedom, and with its sophisticated expansion of seemingly simple realism into a large symbolic system, is reminiscent of other modern classics of Chinese independent filmmaking, such as those by Ying Liang (including “Taking Father Home,” “The Other Half,” and “When Night Falls”) and Liu Jiayin (“Oxhide”). The mere fact of its existence, at a time of stringent control, is remarkable, which makes Zhang’s directorial achievement all the more impressive. It is also a crucial reminder of the artistic and political centrality of independent filmmaking, regardless of its marginal place in the movie business. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
