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Reviews
Jia nian hua (2017)
A riveting multidimensional depiction of the aftermath of abuse
In "Angels Wear White", Director Vivian Qu involves viewers in a riveting, multidimensional depiction of the aftermath of a case of abuse of two young girls. The story unfolds through our observation of two key characters. One is a victim, a child of divorced parents who chooses to go live with her father rather than her mother as she struggles to move on from the trauma of her assault.
An interweaving parallel story centres on our observation of a young worker in the hotel where the incident occurs. Her moral struggle involves attempts not to involve herself in any investigations due to her own precarious situation.
We also see other female characters, including the hotel front desk clerk and the victim's divorced mother struggle in their own way to make their way in a world filled with implicit and explicit male dominance and few easy choices. We in the audience cannot help but feel as though we are similarly implicated in the events portrayed.
At several points, Qu employs an ellipsis worthy of Robert Bresson. As in life, we are left to wonder what exactly has transpired, who has problems of their own, and who is trustworthy. Qu is astute in her choices of what not to show, including incidents and threats of sexual violence. Instead Qu masterfully involves the audience in unravelling the aftermath through the experiences of the victims' families, the seemingly morally ambivalent hotel staff, a stalwart female attorney, and some dubious police investigators. One also wonders if perhaps Bresson's "actor-model" technique was used with some of the younger actors, if not the complex, emotionally charged performances of the parents and attorney.
The backdrop to this story is a seaside resort town's statue of Marilyn Monroe forever frozen in Monroe's famous windblown skirt pose from "The Seven Year Itch". This symbolic imported Hollywood goddess ultimately acts as the lead character a third parallel narrative. The statue speaks silently and ironically to what Naomi Wolf called the "beauty myth" as it plays out in the lives of these girls and women.
An hour or a day or a week after viewing Angels Wear White, the story will live on in your mind. The subject matter is in no way restricted to the lives of people in a Chinese resort town. The viewer will know that girls and women face similar issues with different details in Des Moines, Delhi, Dakar, etc. Feminist themes that might be routinely targeted to a particular demographic in our Hollywood commercial cinema transcend those boundaries in the film. Qu's adept storytelling is at once feminist & humanist, realist & figurative, and chillingly universal.
Shuiyin jie (2013)
No easy answers when you walk down Trap Street
Trap Street by director Vivian Qu portrays ordinary experiences -- chance meetings, infatuations, and love -- in a familiar yet eerie setting riddled with both overt and implied surveillance. The characters in Trap Street are very believable yet begin as fish in an aquarium, oblivious to their immersion in a contemporary surveillance society. When personal lives accidentally and suddenly cross a certain line to provoke official concern, a seemingly free person is confined to a fish bowl of scrutiny and coercion.
The casual disregard shown for pervasive surveillance in Trap Street is both ironic and deliberately characteristic of life in our times. The protagonist played by Yulai Lu is a surveyor and a digital citizen of his particular patch of the global village. He spends his time after hours gaming online with his pals, creates his own digital mapping projects through his smartphone and does odd jobs installing video surveillance gear for sketchy clients.
Director Vivian Qu clearly maintains an open-ended approach to the story, free of pat answers or a formulaic resolution to the climactic events. The art of the film lies in Qu's choice to only subtly imply a point of view, allowing the performances and the story to unfold in a way that is open to interpretation. The Q&A session following the screening spoke to the success of Qu's light hand. A highly engaged audience offered diverse questions and insights, and expressed several responses to the story not intended by Qu.
Similarly, her leads, Yulai Lu and Wenchao He, are experienced actors who deliver measured, sincere performances. Lu and He convey a natural romantic connection but resist overplaying to the highly charged circumstances. As brought to life by the players, the atmosphere of the film is by turns realistic, banal, unobtrusive, carefree, intimate and stifling.
The bureaucratic backdrop of stark officialdom is reinforced by the confining streetscapes of Nanjing, the old Chinese capital under the Nationalists. The narrow field of view at street level used by cinematographers Mathieu Laclau and Li Tian leaves the viewer with the sense of belonging to a group of eerily omnipresent overseers.
Toward the close of the film the focus shifts from official scrutiny and social pressures and returns to the personal. The audience is left to consider what has just transpired. We tend to live our lives assuming the existence of an invisible but reassuring line that insulates our private lives from scrutiny. Is that line ever really there?