Complete first draft for Vinegar Syndrome/KimStim.
Sometimes, it's all in a name. In an interview for Senses of Cinema conducted by Maja Korbecka, Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka explained the subtle difference between the Chinese and English title of their third feature-length collaboration. In Chinese, Shí mén, translates most readily to "stone gate," but for the English title the directors and life partners opted for Stonewalling, used to refer to a refusal to communicate with others. For his own part, Otsuka explained that sticking with a literal version of the Chinese title felt "too hard and cold," and that the relatively softer connotations of the verb felt more apt, corresponding with their heroine's state of mind and heart. Such concerns over naming, a key component of international film distribution all too readily forgotten in a film's discussion once the process has been complete, feel especially appropriate for a film as rooted in its disparate homes as Stonewalling. In the broadest terms, it acts as the third iteration of Huang and Otsuka's harrowing tales of young women living in contemporary China, known (for now) as the "Female Trilogy." They are all centered upon the presence of Yao Honggui, an actor of tremendous watchfulness who has only appeared in their films to date, though any narrative linkages that her presence may invoke are either subliminal or nonexistent. Egg and Stone (2012) is credited solely to Huang—who grew up in a rural village in Hunan province—as director and screenwriter, while the Japanese native Otsuka, who came to the mainland during a boom in Chinese independent filmmaking in the 2000s, has served as the cinematographer of all three films. The couple now lives in Japan, where the film officially hails from, though all of Stonewalling was shot over a ten-month period in Hunan. Nevertheless, these questions of film identity and crediting seem to melt away when confronted with the first sequence of their first collaboration. A teenage girl sits on her bed, bathed in dark amber light, picking at her underwear while (what appears to be) menstrual blood is visible on her left thigh. She scratches at her window, entirely covered with taped-up cardboard, before wrapping a pillow tightly across her face, only stopping after a repeated series of knocks at her door. Egg and Stone, easily Huang's most oblique film, operates in much the same elliptical register as its opening. Yao plays a character also named Honggui, a 14-year-old living in Huang's home village who has been staying with her aunt and uncle for an extended period of time while her parents—entirely absent from the film—are making a living. Across a taut 100 minutes, a near-silent Honggui (the first words in the film are spoken 10 minutes in; it takes Yao herself another 15 minutes to talk) deals with the isolation of her setting, her growing alarm at her sudden lack of menstruation, and then the fallout from an emergency abortion. To capture all this, Huang often opts for frank, abstracted frames that isolate specific body parts, even utilizing some point-of-view shots that emphasize her growing self-comprehension. Little is stated outright, though much of the horror surrounding the assault that produced this unfathomable rupture in her life registers nonetheless. One of the few things that does become clear are the source of the little splotches on her leg, a few birthmarks also glimpsed in the following two films; their similarity to such a defining aspect of womanhood is an incidental but telling detail, the appearance of normalcy that, for one reason or another, Yao's characters cannot match up to. If Egg and Stone is enigmatic in its focus, The Foolish Bird (2017), the first of these films officially co-directed by Huang and Otsuka, is equally confounding in its sprawl. Yao now plays Lynn, a high-schooler living with her grandparents in the urban town of Meicheng in Hunan, which has been recently gripped by an unsolved rape and murder of a fellow student. In response to both this crime and declining test results, the administration has begun seizing the students' cellphones. Lynn lacks one of her own, but she begins stealing the mobiles of her bullies so that she and her friend May can resell them. This amateur crime spree intersects with ever-darker undercurrents of the noticeably larger locale, resulting in disastrous consequences and yet another unwanted pregnancy for Yao's character. Operating as it does within a more discernable causal narrative, The Foolish Bird trades a good deal of its predecessor's spare elegance for a deeper examination of its sometimes insightful, occasionally ham-fisted interpersonal and societal dynamics. Huang and Otsuka use scope framing and wider shots to situate their characters within an often hostile environment, dilapidated streets giving way to bare buildings in a state of continual construction. Lynn's interests and entanglements might be a tad unwieldy, particularly her articulated hope of eventually becoming a police officer, and the purposefully anticlimactic conclusion to the background criminal investigation is a bit disconnected from her fraught journey. That said, Huang and Otsuka's air of disquietude is retained and expanded upon with great purpose throughout. While Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird have very clear referents within the diegesis of their respective films, Stonewalling, like the film itself, operates along different lines. The clearest correspondence (at least to the original Chinese title) comes at the first pivotal moment: 20-year-old aspiring flight attendant Lynn—Yao Honggui's character name once more, though the prominent presence of her parents, played by Huang's own mother (Huang Xiaoxiong) and father (Xiao Zilong), and lack of reference to The Foolish Bird's events seems to indicate this is a separate character—goes for a physical exam as part of a potential gig donating eggs. After receiving WeChat messages (displayed onscreen) from her friend and sometime co-worker Mo, instructing her to go inside and use the pseudonym Rainy, Lynn walks near an automated gate with an attached camera. As it blares a repeated message claiming an illegal entry and the need to scan a card, Lynn walks to a wall with the faint outline of a door; after a few hesitant pushes, she opens the door and walks through. The contrast between inhuman, high-tech intended entryway and natural material, surreptitious gateway is clear, but it's just as striking that the scene ends there: as with many moments in Stonewalling, the actual, crucial physical exam that will alert Lynn to her unplanned pregnancy is completely elided. In its place is this quotidian complication, yet another byproduct of a society in thrall to modernization without a pulse. Stonewalling is, despite The Foolish Bird's heavy focus on cell phones and Internet cafés, likely Huang and Otsuka's first truly globall-minded film. Such a collision is apparent from the opening shot: a London-style red telephone booth filled with books in the middle of a yard, its door gently swinging shut in the wind. The outdoor dinner party scene that follows revolves around two couples completely absent from the rest of the film, taking place in an amalgam of English and Mandarin Chinese, and it isn't until Lynn and her boyfriend Zhang (Liu Long) get a moment to talk privately that the Hunanese language, so prevalent throughout the previous two films, is heard once more. The interplay between the two predominant languages—highlighted most prominently in the tongue-twister phrases “forty is forty,” “fourteen is fourteen,” “forty isn’t fourteen” (sì shí shì sì shí, shí sì shì shí sì, sì shí bú shì shí sì) that Lynn repeats to herself in an effort to improve her Mandarin—is difficult to discern for those unfamiliar with at least one of them, but it comes to mirror the back-and-forth arc of Lynn's journey across this roughly ten-month period. The film takes place entirely within Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, with a metropolitan population approximately 55 times larger than the previous two films' settings combined. This isn't even in the top 15 largest Chinese cities, but the many scenes set in towering structures or on bustling streets attest to an ingrained cosmopolitanism. Even after Lynn stops living in a succession of hotels with Zhang and moves in with her parents to a smaller and less opulent area of the city—swinging the ratio of Hunanese to Mandarin back towards the former's favor—there are plenty of Mandarin-requiring business interactions and forays that startle for the sheer number of people onscreen. Sightseeing, a mode absent from previous films for both notability of location and the leisure it's associated with, has a small but frequent role here, with a brief shot of a massive statute depicting an unusually young Mao Zedong serving as the pinnacle of the defamiliarized images that Stonewalling frequently seeks to capture. The film's two-and-a-half hours and more neutral 1.85:1 framing produces the room for such moments, an ever-wider view of the very recent past. Amid all these newfound sights, it wouldn't be too surprising if Huang and Otsuka's grasp on their heroine loosened once more à la The Foolish Bird, offering "merely" a diffuse but expansive portrait of a Chinese city at a specific moment in time, yet much of Stonewalling's achievement lies in its ability to capture many of the best aspects of both its brethren. The means by which it does so is inseparable from the throngs of city dwellers and socioeconomic infrastructure: through Lynn's continual work in the gig economy (as conducted via agents and WeChat contacts), she is constantly contending with different visions and embodiments of the different pathways her life could take. Given that each role seen in the film is on a strictly non-contractual basis, and her aspirations of becoming a flight attendant are only seen in one training session—the appearance of the ersatz plane forms an odd rhyme with one of the few other films to overtly depict such an object: Nobuhiko Obayashi's Beijing Watermelon, another film surrounding the dreams of Chinese youth whose conclusion was also daringly altered due to an unforeseen global event—Lynn is often exposed to scenarios that could only arise in a specific transactional context. While she witnesses and aids in what is essentially the entire evaluation of the worth of a person, the viewer in turn pictures how Lynn might fare in the same interaction, in the process thinking back upon the context provided by both this film and her past incarnations. It's certainly no accident that her first job, standing in an enticing dress outside a jewelry store, shows a towering mannequin in a bridal dress, yet another point of impossible, idealized comparison. Stonewalling was conceived in response to a short, plangent question that Huang and Otsuka's daughter asked of her mother: "Why did you give birth to me?" It's difficult to imagine what the film's original ending might have been like had the COVID-19 pandemic not happened, but Lynn's pregnancy, presented throughout the film in more purely pragmatic terms than anything else—her decision to carry the baby to term in order to satisfy her mother's debt is equal parts calculated and sentimental—assumes a devastating force in response to reality's intrusion. It's notable that the first precursors of the pandemic—in the form of masks—are assigned to arguably the film's most exploited characters: the Uyghur prospective egg donors from Xinjiang, who are given masks when they go outside for both medical purposes and, perhaps, to avoid any prying eyes; and Silvia, whose sole scene suggests that the Boss intends to traffic Lynn's infant instead. Their peripheral roles act as another sign of all—whether it be a different language or secretive conniving—that eludes Lynn's ability to understand the growing world she must inhabit, and in some ways that feeling gets refracted onto the viewer with the reveal, almost two hours in, that this film takes place on the cusp of the year 2020, a sudden shift situating the viewer in the recent past to rival a similar one in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Asako I & II. From there, the pandemic arrives in a rush, as vivid a recreation of that period as any that has come out in the past five years, focusing as it must upon how the economics of the situation dovetail with personal problems: Lynn sells masks at her parents' clinic while in her final trimester, has to stay by herself during the traditional Chinese New Year homecoming, and her long awaited reunion with Zhang happens partly out of his need for a mask. The shot of Yao immediately before this eerie scene of depopulated streets is an unusual close-up which calls to mind a similar, rare moment of grace for Honggui in Egg and Stone. Where that scene featured the teenager posing for her friend to paint a portrait, Lynn's situation is much more ambiguous, a magnificent expression of weariness before she must put the mask back on once more. Stonewalling's ending is as irresolute as its predecessors' are definitive: Egg and Stone represented a somewhat hopeful new chapter in Honggui's life, a return to normalcy in a natural setting after the trauma that had preceded it, while The Foolish Bird's demonstrated a rejection of the corrupting forces of technology and personal entanglements. Here, though it connects cleanly to Lynn's mother's earlier warning that she would become attached to the baby, its precise meaning in the context of all that surrounds her is left unanswered. But it seems to resonate with the idea of Lynn, and so many other young Chinese women of her generation, as adrift in this modern world, continually cast aside and denigrated by society's preconceptions and the whims of fate, even those with global consequences. And so the cycle of pained abandonment continues, something which Huang and Otsuka's cinema captures with exquisite, incisive melancholy.
